Chapter 7

Seven

CADIEUX HOUSE, LONDON - JUNE 6, 1816

CELINE

The servants would wake soon. I needed to set my study to rights before that happened. I needed to change out of my gown. I needed to stand, to move off the hard wood floor. I needed to do anything but stare at the old slip of parchment.

Hyde Park, 6:30

-W

There were months before I could bring myself to enter Gabriel's study at Rycliffe Place. In the end, it was only after the late duke decreed that his heir, Xander, would have his rightful bachelor lodgings that I left. Only then had I abandoned the house Gabriel and I built a life in. That had been a blessing, in the end.

At the time, it felt like a death sentence. Pack up or abandon every beautiful memory I had with the love of my life. It was not a simple undertaking, nor an easy one. And one of the unpleasant tasks had been haphazardly stuffing every remotely incriminating document into a trunk to be moved to Cadieux House.

For all his faults, Gabriel had been a loving brother. He would not have wanted Xander to know of his more disreputable dealings. And so it fell to me to hide the evidence.

For nearly a year, my husband's documents yellowed in three trunks. They resided in the corner of my makeshift study gathering dust for the maid to whisk away every week or so.

I had a great many trunks of Gabriel's belongings. Some were easier to open than others. Some had not been touched in seven years.

To this day, I could not explain what possessed me to crack open the trunks that day, thirteen months after he left me. But that was the day I found the note.

That was the day I remembered the missing piece.

At first, all I could do was relive his final moments. All of the things I'd needed to say but could not manage to choke out. The inane thoughts of those moments haunted me—that I hadn't felt him leave our bed that morning. The beautiful words I desperately wanted him to leave with, the ones I was too distraught to verbalize. The way his handsome face had been obscured by a veil of tears. And I could remember every single one of his last heartbeats.

But Gabriel's last day had been full of laughter and love. We had enjoyed a morning luxuriating in bed, an afternoon of teasing at the races, an evening spinning around the dance floor, and a night spent in worship and being worshiped.

Later, I recalled the desperate nature with which he clung to me that final night. He had been insatiable, frenzied, and adoring. Reverent hands cupped cheeks. Impassioned words of love rasped between strained breaths. Infinite kisses had no end or beginning. Adoring lips and tongue tasted every inch of my body. Our lovemaking always had glimpses of those elements, but that night was something else entirely. Again and again, he took me, with a veracity we had not managed even in the earliest days of our marriage.

Then I opened the trunk. Months later, I found the note in his things. In retrospect, it was obvious. Gabriel had known. Maybe not how, or when, or for certain. But the possibility was forefront in his mind that night.

He had known each kiss might be our last.

Once that dreadful understanding made its home in my chest, the recollection of Gabriel's evasive answers at the races that last day gave way to the memory of a wiry form, umber hair, and impossibly blue eyes.

William.

A man with whom I'd had but two—less than pleasant—interactions. We'd spoken but once, and we'd shared a single glimpse across a crowded field.

The first meeting left me frightened, insulted, and vaguely threatened. His love had stumbled across me practicing my fencing in a damp field between Yorkshire moors. Adriane was strange, skeletal, and unearthly beautiful. When William came for her, he came with nothing but biting sarcasm for me and adoration for her. His eyes, so full of desperate love for the strange, barefoot wraith when he fell to his knees before her, were cold and dead the next time I saw him years later across that field.

I racked my brain for days after I found the note. I fought desperately to recall the vague, euphemistic conversation Gabriel and I shared more than a year before, that day at the races. He was certain that Adriane was gone, that she had succumbed to her illness and insanity. And William wished to speak with my Gabriel later that week.

Then I understood. I realized the truth of that conversation. It had been my husband's last evasion, his last half-truth.

The conversation he claimed was to take place later that week almost certainly occurred the next morning at dawn—with pistols drawn.

Beyond that supposition, I had only guesses of my husband's final hours. The moments between him leaving our bed and collapsing on our front steps, a knife in his back, were a mystery.

Presumably, Gabriel went to Hyde Park at the designated time. Whether he stood there alone or whether pistols were fired was anyone's guess. But there were no swords or pistols on his person. Perhaps his challenger supplied the weapons.

At some point, Gabriel stopped by the florist, likely on his way home from that dawn meeting. The irises he brought for me fell with him, scattered by the wind into the pool of his blood. A horrifying reminder of his killer's cruelty.

The rest of my love's final moments were filled with pain and chaos.

W could only be William Hart. I was more certain of it than I was of anything else in this life.

William, with the magnetic cobalt eyes, once filled with love, then filled with death, and finally last night, lust. He was the man on the balcony.

He had kissed me. The thought left my stomach churning with bile, spilling up my throat to leave a metallic tang on my tongue.

Worse still, I had kissed him. Hell, I had been the instigator. Gabriel's killer had his lips on mine. His hands caressed my cheek, traced my neck, and dug into my waist.

Those hands had blood on them.

My husband's blood.

I choked back a gag at the thought.

I was wretched. I had liked it— loved it, even . William Hart's kisses were inspired.

And repulsive.

I had lain with men—a man—since I lost Gabriel. And I had enjoyed my time with Michael. But our encounters had been a means to an end for us both. We had been lucky to forge a friendship on the side of that.

But last night—those kisses…

They hadn't been merely pleasant. I had been filled with bubbling delight, bathed in lust. One kiss and I was... I felt like I could breathe again.

Emotions and sensations so long dormant I thought them lost to time and Gabriel had roared to life again. Feelings that had abandoned me so long ago that I no longer knew the name for them, swam to the surface once again.

And for that man to find them—to break them free—to bring them back to me… It was sick. It was disgusting.

It was wrong.

Once the hall clock struck five I recognized the world beyond the slip of parchment pinched between my thumb and forefinger.

The wooden floor of my study was cold, particularly in my once beloved—now loathed—plum gown.

From my vantage, I could see an oversized clump of dust under the bookshelf in the corner that the maid had missed—for at least a year if the size was any indication. The sun was rising, a coppery, fiery slash across the horizon spilling on the wood panels before me. And there was a little gray spider that had made its webbed home between the window and the curtain.

When the hall clock struck six, I finally managed to move, first one foot, then the other. At last, I slid myself up along the wall to stand. Carefully, I returned the ledgers, then the loose documents to the open trunk. Finally, I set the incriminating piece of parchment on top of the pile before shutting the lid with a decisive thunk .

In my distress the night before, I had knocked over the chair and I set that to rights as well.

Last night may have been the most disturbing of my life, but I had a mission now—a purpose. I had found my husband's murderer… After seven long years. I was going to see him punished for his crimes.

And absolutely nothing was going to stop me.

Just as soon as I found someone to remove the spider from the house.

I consumed far too many cups of coffee while formulating my plan. If they taught proper murder investigation procedures to ladies, I had missed it sometime between fleeing France and charming the beau monde.

Still, the difficult part was already complete. I had my culprit. I would simply work backward to find the evidence.

What that evidence looked like and how I would find it… Surely those details would work themselves out during the investigation. What I would do with the evidence once I found it… The answer would present itself at that time.

I was under no delusions about my husband having been a good man, but he had been the best husband. He had loved me deeply, fiercely, passionately.

I also knew that I had not known him at his worst.

" I do not seduce innocents. Not anymore."

That had been his one rule, the same rule that nearly ended our romance before it began. Until I made him see sense, made him understand that I had seduced him and he had no say in the matter whatsoever.

The "anymore" held a great deal of significance and weight. Nothing could have prepared me to meet that frail, deathly ill innocent a few months into our marriage. Nor could anything have readied me for her companion, a man who wore his heart in his eyes and gifted insults the way other men gifted flowers.

Gabriel had been in town when Adriane stumbled across me in the country. After our meeting, I stewed for days, alone in the family estate, waiting for Gabriel's return. That was the night he finally told me the worst of it.

I had known, of course, about the mistress, the gambling, the brothel he owned a stake in, and the scheme with the horse breeding. But she had been his greatest sin. He felt no guilt over the rest, but Adriane , she was his one regret.

In confessing that sin, he had told me the story of William and Adriane. The details were foggy from that emotionally fraught night. The most devastating argument Gabriel and I ever had.

Now, I racked my brain for threads of a story relayed to me nearly a decade ago. Anything, the slightest tidbit could be the key to it all.

William had been a steward's son, or possibly a tenant of Rose Hall. The two boys had been close in age. Gabriel's father was fond of William and paid for his education alongside his own son and heir. But unlike Gabriel, William had been studious and mild-mannered and planned to go into the law, or perhaps the clergy. It reached a point where His Grace preferred William to his own son.

At some point, Adriane's family had let the estate nearby. Gabriel was certain that William loved her at first sight. Gabriel was equally certain that she preferred him to William. But William didn't see it and had set off to university to earn a living to support Adriane.

And then came the event. Gabriel spoke in the vaguest of self-deprecating details. His Grace was upset with Gabriel for some reason and spoke of wishing William was his son and heir, not Gabriel. That was when Adriane had found him. And he took her, in a horse barn of all places, laughing when she asked him to speak to her father. It was the worst thing Gabriel ever did, to seduce and abandon a gently bred lady, and he regretted it always.

Several months later, William tracked Gabriel to town. He raved that Adriane was ruined by Gabriel's actions and had been thrown out by her own family. The conversation ended in fisticuffs. It was then that Gabriel swore never to touch another innocent. But he still didn't look for her. He learned later that William had incurred the duke's wrath and been cut off when he left the study of law to enlist in the army.

That had been the entirety of the story until that unseasonably warm day in Yorkshire. I could only surmise that William had found her in France while in His Majesty's service. If her bawdy, disconcerting speech from our one meeting was any indication, he hadn't found her in Versailles, but a back alley somewhere.

The story picked up again only after Adriane's suspected death, when William found Gabriel at the races and requested a meeting. Gabriel had assumed it was for assistance with funeral expenses. I knew better now.

To think, I had felt sympathy for the wretched man. I had even once found the notion heartachingly romantic. For a man to leave every privilege he'd worked for to join a war for the sole purpose of finding his lost love, only to find her lost to madness.

Fury now burned where pity had once flourished.

That wretched man was my primary suspect—my only suspect. I needed to know him better than I knew myself if I was to bring him to justice.

He spoke excellent French and made free with his insults while using it. He had eventually gone into the law, and he worked with Kate's brother. His left hand was stained with ink, indicating a preference. He'd carried a sword that day in Yorkshire, and it was safe to assume he'd learned to use a rifle in the military.

William was also shy or skilled at feigning timidity, and he was certainly not often in society or I would have stumbled across him years ago. And he kissed like he would never get another opportunity.

So little information to proceed with, especially since much of it was likely not pertinent to my investigation.

I needed more.

I could set up a meeting with Lord Leighton, but he likely shared an office with William. And Kate would certainly begin wedding planning if asked her to arrange a less formal meeting between me and her brother

I could not ask Her Grace. She was unobservant at the best of times. If she even recalled William's existence, it would be a small miracle.

Davina was much too young to remember details.

That left only Xander as a source of intelligence. I set off at once to Rycliffe Place. And if Xander was unavailable, I could search for anything I might have missed when I packed up.

Investigating was not so terribly difficult after all.