“So she was going to leave him with his father?” Malcolm asked.
“Ashton adores the boy. Of course Julia hoped she’d be able to see him eventually.”
“And your own children?” Davenport was observing Tony with the expression Geoffrey Blackwell wore when he looked at something particularly disagreeable under the microscope. “You have two, I believe. Were you planning to exercise a father’s rights and keep them with you? Take them to your exile in Italy and let Julia be their stepmother?”
“I—” Tony ran a hand over his hair. “I hadn’t thought that far.”
Davenport continued to lean back in his chair, but from the look in his eyes and the tension in his arms, he wanted nothing more than to plant Tony a facer. Malcolm, thinking of his own son, was of much the same mind, but such an action would be sadly unproductive in the investigation.
“Did Lady Julia ever seem to you to be afraid?” Malcolm asked.
“When I first met her she was terrified of Vedrin and the hold he had on her with her gambling debts.”
“And more recently?”
Tony appeared to give the question genuine consideration. “She felt guilty. About Ashton, about her son. But afraid—No. What makes you think she was afraid?”
“She wrote to her sister that she was.”
“Cordelia?” Tony’s gaze flickered to Davenport. “Your wife.”
“She goes by that name.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense.” Tony frowned into his beer glass. “I know Julia was in the habit of corresponding with Cordelia, but she told me she found it harder and harder to write to her of late. Since our affair began. Because of course she couldn’t write to her about that so she had to fill the letters with trivialities.”
“Why?” Davenport said.
“She had to have something to put in the letters.”
“Why couldn’t she tell Cordelia about the affair?”
“Tell her sister she was involved with another man and about to leave her husband and child—”
“You think Cordelia would be scandalized? You’ve known my wife since she was a child.”
“That doesn’t—”
“And your brother was her lover.”
Tony’s gaze slid to the side. “For God’s sake, Davenport—”
Davenport raised his brows. “Considering you’ve admitted to betraying your own wife, having an affair with a married woman, and planning to run off with her, I don’t see what you’re caviling at saying. Unless you’re embarrassed by referring to the fact that I was cuckolded. Believe me, I got over it years ago.”
Tony’s gaze locked with Davenport’s own. “I think Julia was afraid Cordelia would advise her to act differently based on her own example.”
Davenport stretched his legs out toward the edge of the canal. “That doesn’t sound like Cordelia.”
“Julia said her sister had changed in the last few years.”
“That doesn’t sound like Cordelia, either.”
Tony’s gaze settled on Davenport’s face. It looked a little less unfocused than it had previously. “But then it’s been some years since you’ve seen your wife, hasn’t it?”
“Fair enough. And of course in the end your brother and my wife didn’t run off together and seek release from their respective marriages. Did you ask your brother why he didn’t marry Cordelia?”
Tony’s gaze widened. “I thought—”
“That I stood in the way of a divorce? My dear Tony, why would I seek to keep a woman who so obviously didn’t want me?”
“You didn’t—”
“Cordelia never asked me for a divorce as it happens. I saw no need to put us both through it. But we’ve rather drifted from the point. Julia did write the letter to Cordelia saying she was afraid. That she feared for her life.”
“Feared for her life?”
“Are you sure Vedrin had stopped bothering Julia?” Malcolm asked.
“He had no reason to continue. I’d paid off the debts.”
“You’d paid off the debts she told you about. You don’t know that she told you about all of them.”
Tony tugged at his stained shirt collar. “She didn’t actually. I got Vedrin to tell me the full amount. And then I paid it all.”
“You don’t know that she hadn’t acquired more debts since,” Davenport said.
“She stopped gambling.”
“You’ve spent every moment with her since the affair began?”
“She promised me. She swore to it.”
“And lovers never lie.”
“Julia wouldn’t have.” Tony’s eyes were wide and blue and earnest. “Not to me.”
“For a man capable of leaving his wife and children, you have a touching romanticism.”
Malcolm shifted his chair to avoid the glare of the sun off the pavement. “Where were you last night, Tony?”
“Where you were. At Stuart’s ball.”
“I slipped out as it happens. I was at the Château de Vere when Julia was killed.”
“You—”
“And I managed to get back to the ball without anyone except my wife realizing I’d gone. Amazing how easy it is to do that at a large entertainment.”
Tony stared at him. “You’re suggesting I could have—You think I rode to the château and killed Julia? Good God—”
“Can you tell us who you spoke with between midnight and two?” Davenport asked.
Tony ran a hand over his hair. “I took Sarah Lennox in to supper. I danced with her afterwards. I danced with my sister and with Catherine Somerset and then with—My wife. Then I realized I hadn’t seen Julia since supper. I went looking for her. Wandered through the ballroom and salons. Exchanged greetings, but I wasn’t noting whom I spoke to.”
“When did you learn she’d been killed?” Davenport asked.
“This morning. At breakfast. Freemantle called round and told my wife and Violet and me.”
“For God’s sake, Chase,” Davenport said, “this will go a lot faster if you avoid lying. You obviously haven’t slept. You learned last night.”
Tony swallowed. “All right, I saw Ashton leave the ball alone.” He glanced to the side, then met Davenport’s gaze. “I followed him home. I knew something was wrong. I was afraid Ashton had discovered the truth, and he and Julia had quarreled. I never guessed—After I saw him go into the house alone I bribed the footman for information.”
“Do you think Ashton did know about the affair?” Malcolm asked.
“No. That is—” Tony stared from Malcolm to Davenport. “You don’t think Ashton—”
“We don’t have enough information yet to think anything,” Malcolm said. “But lovers and husbands are obvious suspects.”
Tony looked from Malcolm to Davenport. The sun fell hard and clear over his face. “I didn’t kill her. I know you don’t believe me, but I hope to God instead of wasting time on me, you’ll discover who was behind her death. And then I’ll finish the bastard myself.”
14
S
uzanne cast a sideways glance at Cordelia Davenport as they left the Chase house. Lady Cordelia had tugged on her gloves, adjusted her bonnet, and taken her leave of Violet and Jane Chase with every appearance of composure. More composure than either of the Chase ladies had shown. But now her face was set in firm lines beneath the brim of her bonnet. As though she were hanging on to her self-command by her fingernails.
As the footman pushed the front door to behind them, Lady Cordelia’s foot slipped on the sand-scoured steps. Suzanne caught the other woman’s arm in a firm grip. Beneath the light muslin of her gown, Cordelia was shaking and, despite the sticky heat, her skin was ice-cold.
“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said. “I—”
“Entirely understandable. We both need fortification.” Suzanne retained her grip on Cordelia’s arm as they descended the remainder of the steps, and then steered the way down the street and round the corner. A blue and gold sign, slightly faded but still bright in the sunlight, proclaimed Les Trois Roses café. It had become a favorite haunt of Suzanne’s during her weeks in Brussels for the excellence of the coffee, the quality of the wine, and the discretion of the staff. She said nothing until she and Cordelia were seated at a table in a secluded window alcove and supplied with glasses of Bordeaux.
Lady Cordelia curled both hands round the glass. It shook in her fingers. She took a quick sip, then set the glass down with great care. She stared into the deep red of the wine, eyes dark with the ghosts of memories. “Of all the names I’ve justifiably been called, I never thought of myself as missish. What a poor creature you must think me.”
“On the contrary.” Suzanne draped her scarf over the chairback and stripped off her gloves. “I’m amazed you maintained your composure so well. It’s never easy to confront the past.” She took a sip of wine. It tasted more bitter than she remembered.
Cordelia laced her fingers together round the stem of her own wineglass. “We all grew up together. The Chases didn’t have a feather to fly with and neither did Julia and I, but none of us understood about mortgaged estates and the lack of proper dowries yet. We lived in a sort of charmed, golden world. Picking strawberries, sneaking bottles of champagne from our parents’ wine cellars, playing with the Mallinsons at Carfax Court and the Devonshire House children at Chatsworth.”
“Where you met Lady Caroline Lamb.”
Cordelia’s mouth twisted. “Next to Caro I used to be considered the stable one. We got up to all sorts of mischief.” She took another sip of wine. “The two Devonshire girls—Little G and Harryo—always looked a bit askance at us. They approved of Julia, who was always much better behaved than I was. As was Violet, though Vi had more of an adventurous streak.” Her mouth curved as happier memories seemed to drift through her mind. “Johnny was ridiculously honorable even as a boy. But he tagged along after us to make sure we didn’t get in too much trouble. He was following Violet round in those days. And he and Tony Chase were friends. Hard to believe—” Her fingers tightened round the stem of her glass.
“People grow up.”
“And change.” Cordelia’s mouth twisted. “George Chase and I—We were the oldest in our respective families, the most daring, the ones who organized the amateur theatricals and the secret moonlight picnics by the lake. I decided I was going to marry him when I was twelve, though it was more like realizing something I’d always known than making a conscious decision. When I was sixteen, I looked at him over the Christmas punch bowl and realized that marriage entailed a great deal more than I’d previously considered.”
“But that didn’t change your mind about whom you wanted to marry?”
“On the contrary. I was more convinced I wanted George than ever. And George wanted me. I knew that when he kissed me under the mistletoe and then later in the birch coppice when we were delivering Boxing Day gifts. It all seemed so easy and so perfect. We were desperately in love. The way one only is the first time.”
“So I remember,” Suzanne said, though her own first love had been a good deal more complicated.
Cordelia pushed her glass away across the table. “George proposed at my come-out ball when I was eighteen and he was just down from Oxford. In my parents’ conservatory. Such a cliché, but that night all I could think was how perfect my life would be. Odd now to remember I was ever such a romantic.”
“Your parents forbade the match?”
“How did you guess?”
“Something stopped you from marrying him.”
Cordelia rubbed a hand over her eyes. “George went to my father the next day. I thought it was purely a formality. I could scarcely believe it when I saw George stalking out of the house. Then Papa summoned me to his study. He said he couldn’t condemn me to a life of poverty. When I protested that I loved George, and we’d be happy as long as we were together, my father said that I’d learn soon enough that love didn’t outlast privation. It’s odd, Papa never seemed very interested in either Julia or me, but in that moment he was almost tender.”
The light ironic tone could not quite disguise the pain beneath. “I don’t imagine you took it easily,” Suzanne said.
“I cried. I railed. I slipped out of the house and tracked George down in a gambling hell. I wanted to go straight to Gretna Green. George persuaded me to wait. With time, surely our parents would come round.” Cordelia hunched her shoulders and pulled her wineglass back toward her. Her gloves pulled taut over her knuckles. “That Christmas, George went to a house party in Hampshire and became betrothed to Annabel Lovell. An heiress with a fortune of sixty thousand pounds.”
Suzanne saw the knife-cut heartbreak of an eighteen-year-old girl in the cynical gaze of the woman before her. “It must have been unbearable.”
“It probably saved us both from the rude awakening my father warned me of. I don’t think either George or I was suited to love in a cottage. Though it would have been easier on Harry and on Annabel Lovell if George and I had inflicted ourselves on each other instead of on them. I wouldn’t believe the betrothal was real until I heard it from George himself. When I saw him in London after the holidays, he told me there’d been no alternative. We couldn’t have been happy with nothing to live on, and he had to see to his brother and sister. I called him a coward and worse. We didn’t part well.” She rubbed her arms. “George married Annabel Lovell at St. George’s Hanover Square, then bought a commission. He went off to the Peninsula shortly after his honeymoon. For about six months I was certain I would die.”
“And then?”
Cordelia snatched up her glass and took a sip of wine. “I realized I was going to survive, like it or not. I flung myself into the Season. I’d always liked pretty things. It occurred to me life had other sources of pleasure to offer besides love. Which I was still certain I’d never feel again.” She frowned. “Not that I have precisely come to think of it.”
“A first love is different from the ones that come after.”
“Assuming any do come after.” Cordelia brushed a speck of lint from the tablecloth. “The next spring at a ball at Devonshire House I met Harry. He was clever, different from the usual boys just down from Oxford who flirted with me and tried to look down my bodice and trod on my toes. And he had a handsome fortune.” She lifted her gaze and met Suzanne’s own, her eyes defiant.
“Naturally having given up on love, you’d be prudent.”
“Or cynical. Harry and I were wildly unsuited. He liked to stay home with his books, I liked to go out every night. I couldn’t bear to be still, because I didn’t much like the thoughts I had when I was. All the same, we managed to rub along. Until George came home from the Peninsula on leave.”
Suzanne recalled the force of the tension between the Davenports in her salon that afternoon. Such tension only came in the wake of emotions that had once run very strong indeed. “That must have been unspeakably difficult.”
Cordelia’s gaze moved to a pastoral print on the wall, then to the window. “I was arrogant enough to believe I was indifferent to him. Love was a conceit, so how could I fall victim to it? I’d gone from being a romantic fool of eighteen to an arrogant fool of twenty who thought I was beyond love.”
“And when you saw him—?”
“It all came back. I held out for a bit. Told myself it was just the tug of memories, that I was tougher than that, that I knew it was a sure path to ruin.” Her hands locked together on the tabletop. “Not because I valued my virtue or because I had any particular loyalty to my husband. I’ve never been a very good person, you see. But I was determined never again to make myself so vulnerable. A determination that barely lasted the length of a brief meeting in the country and a reception at Melbourne House. Caro was with me when George walked into the room. She told me to have a care. Whatever people have said about her and Lord Byron, I was just as much of a fool. If I made less of a scandal, it’s only because my lover wasn’t a poet who was the talk of the ton.”
Suzanne read the self-disgust in the twist of Lady Cordelia’s mouth and the hollowness of her gaze. “My husband and I were in Vienna before we came to Brussels. Intrigue of all sorts was the order of the day, romantic as well as diplomatic. It wasn’t so much what people did that caused the scandal. It wasn’t even the liaisons that were public knowledge. It was the liaisons that became such public knowledge no one could even pretend to look the other way.”
“It’s the same in England, though the gossip sets in a bit more quickly.” Cordelia tugged at a loose thread in her puffed sleeve. “Harry seemed to be the last to know. The more flagrantly George and I behaved, the more he buried himself in his books. I almost—”
“Wanted him to notice?”
Cordelia gave a harsh laugh. “That would be delightfully simple, wouldn’t it? The straying wife who really just wanted the attention of the husband she loved deeply. If that isn’t a play, it should be. But the truth is I scarcely had a thought for Harry. I scarcely had a thought for anything but George and our grand passion.”
The last was delivered with all the cynicism of the former romantic. A cynicism Suzanne had never been enough of a romantic herself to feel.
Lady Cordelia tossed down another swallow of wine. “But apparently Harry really didn’t know. Because when he decided to surprise me at Lady Bessborough’s concert of ancient music and found me in George’s arms in an antechamber—” Her fingers tightened round the glass. For a moment Suzanne thought it would shatter. “I’ll never forget the look in his eyes.”
“Angry or hurt?”
“Hurt first. As though he’d been punched in the stomach and stabbed in the back at the same time. Then angry. Like a husband who actually cared for his wife. Far more than the wife realized. Or perhaps his pride was simply hurt. I’ve never claimed to understand Harry very well. He was quite cerebral in those days, but he planted George a facer. George struck back and they went crashing into an ormolu table. Sally Jersey walked into the room thirty seconds later with Corisande Ossulton. The story was all over the house within minutes and all over London by morning.”
“Leaving you no chance to sort things out.”
“I doubt we could have done so in any case. I went home and told Harry he could divorce me. Harry asked if I intended to marry George. I couldn’t even think that far. Though I was sure I could never bear to be parted from George again. Which I said. Harry simply stared at me with a look like a frozen moor and said that in that case I’d better go to my lover.”
“Giving you his permission in a way you’d never forget.”
“I turned and walked from the house. I didn’t even summon a carriage. I went to Caro at Melbourne House and sent George a note. We left for the country the next day. Harry bought himself a commission. He was gone within the week. I didn’t speak to him again until the ball last night.”
“Appallingly bad circumstances.”
“I knew I might see him in Brussels. I knew it would be ghastly. The odd thing is if anyone had told me Harry would be kind to me I’d have laughed in their face.”
“You couldn’t have foreseen—”
“That my sister would die. Even then, Harry surprised me.” Cordelia jabbed a curl beneath the brim of her bonnet. “George and I stayed in the country for a fortnight. We were going to go off to America together. But then George got word that Annabel was pregnant. Reality set in once again.”
Suzanne studied Lady Cordelia. She must have been pregnant herself at about the same time, but she made no reference to it. Had she learned she was expecting a child before or after George Chase left her? And did she know who the father was?
“It’s ancient history,” Cordelia said, reaching for her wineglass. “Or I thought it was. But if Julia and Tony acted out the same folly I did with his brother—” She shuddered. “Julia always seemed immune to such madness. She didn’t even let herself love Johnny. I always thought the reason she was determined not to give way to love was my sad example.”
“Was there anything between her and Anthony Chase when they were younger?”
Cordelia shook her head. “I think Julia thought Tony was too young and callow. How she could have thrown her life away—”
“Cordelia.” Suzanne reached across the table and laid her hand over Cordelia’s own. “You could have been here in Brussels the whole time, offering her sisterly advice every night, and it would have made no difference.”