John chuckled, but only for a moment. “It does sound like Lord Denton is or was involved in more than we imagined. Though it also sounds like he wants it out in the open, or he wouldn’t be suggesting that you find Juliette’s brother in order to get some answers. Does he say which prison?”
Sebastian shook his head. “He probably doesn’t know that either.”
“Well, this all began in Paris where they met Juliette, so we can perhaps assume it is one near there. You are going to pay him a visit?”
Sebastian frowned. “You know, if you think about it, Juliette’s name comes up too often in relation to strange events—the duel, Maggie’s sister’s abrupt departure from White Oaks, my father’s accidents. This is one hell of a convoluted scheme, whatever it is, much bigger than we could have guessed.”
“Cause and effect?” John suggested thoughtfully. “What might have started as a single plot could have spiraled into many more.”
“Could it be that simple?”
John chuckled. “Probably not, but—”
The caretaker opened the door to announce in high annoyance, “A visitor, monsieur. I tell him to come tomorrow at a better hour, but no, he will not go away. He says he knows you, but he will not give his name.”
“Where is he?” Sebastian asked.
Maurice thumbed his hand behind him. “Out front. It is amazing how many people will honor those outer steps as if a door still stood there blocking their way. Is that stew I smell?”
“Help yourself to a bowl, Maurice. I’ll see to our visitor.”
“Want me to go?” John asked. “Half of them say they know you just to gain access to you.”
“Which will make it easier for me to send him on his way. Is there light out there, Maurice, or should I take some with me?”
“My lantern. I leave it on the steps.”
Sebastian nodded and left the kitchen. He hadn’t needed to be concerned with light. It was a clear night. Moonlight bathed the debris in the ruined old great hall he had to pass through. And the glow of Maurice’s lantern was a beacon that outlined the broken stone arch that was all that was left of what used to be the entrance to the keep.
The chap stood on the steps there, his back to the arch, staring out at the moonlit countryside as he waited. He wore a tiered greatcoat for warmth, a thick scarf about his neck, and a hat pulled down low.
And then, apparently hearing Sebastian’s footsteps behind him, he turned. And Sebastian did recognize him. He just didn’t believe what he was seeing.
“I’m real,” he assured Sebastian. “Flesh and bone.”
“And blood? Let’s just make sure you aren’t vapor, shall we?” Sebastian said as he slammed his fist into Giles’s face.
Chapter 49
S EBASTIAN REACHED FOR THE BOTTLE of brandy as he took his seat again at the kitchen table. He ignored the glass now, drinking straight from the bottle. He didn’t want to think. He didn’t want to know. He was so close to losing all semblance of humanity that the slightest thing could tip the scale.
John was staring curiously at the body Sebastian had carted in over his shoulder and dumped on the floor. “Should I wake him?” John asked.
“If you want to see me commit murder, go ahead.”
John glanced at Sebastian in surprise. “Good Lord, what did the fellow do?”
“Turn him over.”
John did and then stepped back with a gasp. “Oh, I say, he looks just like, well, that is, the likeness is uncanny, isn’t it? Didn’t know Lord Wemyss senior had another son tucked away. A bastard?”
“No.”
“But the resemblance is remarkable!”
“Because it’s not a resemblance.”
“But—” John didn’t finish because he came to the only conclusion left. He shook his head firmly. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Neither do I.”
“But you killed him!”
“Yes, and I’m going to kill him again as soon as he wakes up.”
“I’ll help you,” John said with some ire of his own. “When I think of all the repercussions due to his death, and for him not to be dead, well, it quite boggles my mind. By the by, what’d you do to him?”
“He was always a great shot, but he never could take a punch,” Sebastian said in disgust. “A bloody feather could knock him over.”
“That isn’t quite true,” Giles said as he sat up and fingered his jaw. “I can withstand punches well enough, just not from you. And you’re going to let me explain before you kill me, right?”
“Probably not. An explanation eleven years ago would have been welcome. Now there is nothing that can justify—”
“They were going to kill him!” Giles cut in. “When he showed up in Paris, he was already running for his life.”
“Who?”
“My father. God, Seb, I had no idea of what he’d done to us with his damn gambling. He paupered us! There was nothing left.”
“Bloody hell,” Sebastian snarled. “Start from the beginning!”
Giles nodded and rose clumsily to his feet. The years hadn’t treated him well. His brown hair was dulled, riddled with gray. His face was nearly like leather parchment, lined and deeply tanned. There was little semblance of the aristocrat left in him.
“May I sit down?” Giles asked, indicating the extra chairs at the table.
“You’d be pushing it to get that close to me.”
“Quite right,” Giles agreed and began to pace. “So where shall I start?”
“That’s been established.”
“Very well. We were in Paris, Denton and I, rounding up the last week of our tour. He hadn’t enjoyed the trip, spent most of it foxed. Having reached his majority, the fact that he was a second son was making him miserable.”
“If you’re going to tell me that my brother was behind this—”
“No,” Giles said quickly.
“Then stick to the facts, which is all I’m willing to hear.”
“We were having dinner at our hotel. The Poussins, brother and sister, were eating at the next table and struck up a conversation with us. We were asked to join them. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“What were they doing there?”
“Merely having dinner. They lived in the city nearby, often ate at that hotel. The brother, Pierre, didn’t stay long but didn’t insist his sister leave with him, either, which made me suspect that while they were portraying themselves as French aristocrats, and certainly dressed the part, they really weren’t. But anyway, as soon as her brother left, Juliette started flirting outrageously with Denton. He was too deep in his cups to really notice, but they ended up going up to his room together.”
“Why didn’t you stop them?”
“Whatever for? I concluded by then that she was a high-class whore who would cost him a few pounds instead of a few coppers. He’d been having such a lousy time on the trip, I thought he might enjoy the diversion. She was beautiful. She spent the night with him.”
“And yet ends up married to you? You might want to explain that quickly before my fist finds your face again.”
“I never married her. But do you want this out of order, or shall I continue?”
Sebastian gritted his teeth. “Go on.”
“The next day my father showed up. He was waiting in my room when I returned to dress for dinner. I was delighted to see him until I got a good look at him. He was distraught. Good Lord, I could almost smell his fear. I was alarmed, of course. I’d never seen him like that before.”
“Gambling away one’s inheritance will do that to people,” Sebastian concluded from Giles’s earlier remark.
“I wish it had only been that, but it wasn’t. He’d not only lost his inheritance, and mine for that matter, but he’d continued to gamble in order to recoup his losses!”
“With what?”
“Borrowed money, of course. He’d been borrowing from your father for years, apparently. The debt got so high he’d even been obliged t
o turn over the deed to our home to Douglas. But even someone as generous as your father had to draw the line somewhere and refused to give him any more money. My father resented that. I could hear it in his tone when he was explaining all this to me.”
“‘Douglas had everything,’ my father said. ‘A better title, a wonderful mother who doted on him, more money than he’d ever need.’ My father didn’t understand why Douglas had to cut him off.”
“You said Cecil was running for his life?”
Giles sighed. “He ended up borrowing money from the wrong sort of people in London, the sort that won’t tolerate outstanding debts. They’d given him a date to pay up or pay with his life. He couldn’t meet the deadline.”
“And you had no prior warning of any of this?”
“None, but I didn’t really see my father often in those last couple of years. And he did rage at me once for spending too much money, which was a shock. But I didn’t take him seriously. He was foxed at the time. You see, he was trying, desperately, to continue our lives as if nothing had changed. Good Lord, he even let me take the tour, when there was no money to pay for it. Your father paid for it, by the way, and without being asked. He might have refused to support my father’s gambling anymore, but they were still friends—at least he thought they were.”
“What are you implying?”
“I think my father’s resentment against Douglas had turned to hatred by then. How else could he come up with such an outlandish scheme to use against Douglas in order to get himself out of debt?”
“Your supposed death?” Sebastian guessed. “How the devil was that going to get him out of debt?”
“Guilt. He was certain that Douglas would be so overcome with it that he would cancel their debt and even make further recompense. And he was right. Your father did exactly that.”
“And disowned me,” Sebastian snarled as he stood up.
Giles put up a restraining hand. “Wait, that was never part of it. I didn’t even know that had happened until years later. It was certainly never mentioned as a possible outcome. And I was in shock the day my father confessed all this and told me the solution he’d come up with. You don’t think I wanted to participate in my own death, do you?”
“You don’t want to know what I think right now,” Sebastian said, but he resumed his seat. “Continue.”
“My father really was running for his life. He didn’t come to Paris with his plan already thought-out. He’d arrived a few days earlier and apparently had a run-in with Juliette. She’d tried some scam on him for money, which didn’t work. He’d laughed in her face because he had no money. But then he saw her having dinner with Denton and me and how she was flirting with Denton. He figured she was setting Denton up for a scam as well, and that’s when the plan came to him, to use her to manipulate you and me into a duel.”
“So he’d already talked to Juliette before he came to see you?” Sebastian asked.
“Yes.”
“And how did he get her to go along with his ‘plan’?”
“He threatened to have her tossed in jail if she didn’t comply. But later, when I learned she married Denton, I realized your brother was the real reason she got involved.”
“Let’s leave my brother out of this for the moment,” Sebastian said. “So the duel and the reason for it—my having slept with your ‘wife’—all of it was planned ahead of time?”
“Yes. And you fell right into that. If you hadn’t touched her—you know, I actually had hoped you wouldn’t. I was so sick at heart. You were my best friend! I was to make you think you killed me and then disappear for the rest of my life. I didn’t mind disappearing so much. My father was going to send me money after he got his accounts settled. And I wasn’t really ready to marry Eleanor yet, so although I knew I would lose her because of it, I wasn’t heartbroken over that.”
“She was.”
“Yes, I know, and so was I later, but I’m getting ahead of myself. The morning of the duel, I had a leather pouch of blood I was supposed to break, to make my death look real. That was Juliette’s idea. She supplied it. I wasn’t going to fire at you at all. But you!” Giles burst out. “Standing there obviously not going to shoot at me, either. That was ruining the plan.”
“You fired at me,” Sebastian reminded him.
“I had to, but you know I’m an excellent shot. I only nicked your arm to lower it so you’d at least be pointing your damned pistol at me. But bloody hell, you actually did shoot me!”
Giles tore open his shirt to show Sebastian the scar.
Sebastian wasn’t impressed. “Not severe enough,” he said.
Giles stared at him incredulously for a moment, then said calmly, “Actually, it did nearly kill me. She didn’t get me a doctor. And my father wasn’t there, because he was hiding in France until it was all over. Juliette couldn’t have cared less if I died at that point. She’d played her part as the grieving widow. She merely had Anton get me to the coast and put me on a ship back to France.”
“Bloody hell, that’s where I remember him from. He was your second at the duel, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was one of her lackeys.”
“So my being disowned was a minor consequence to you?” Sebastian said, and there was nothing calm about his tone now.
Giles cringed and replied quickly, “Nothing that occurred back then was minor to me, but you haven’t heard the last of it yet. I don’t remember much of that trip back to France. I was dumped on the docks, since the captain didn’t want me dying on his ship. An old woman found me, promised to fix me up if I married her and worked her farm. I’ll be deuced if I know how she pulled it off, but I did end up married to her, and she did patch me up.”
Sebastian had heard enough. He stood up and started to approach Giles. Giles read him correctly and started backing away.
“One,” Sebastian said in a cold, hard voice, “you had ample opportunity to tell me what was going on before anyone could harm your father.”
“So you could do what? You didn’t have the blunt to pay off my father’s debts, I certainly didn’t, and those men really were going to kill him if they found him before he had their money.”
“So instead of letting my father know that his foolishness had progressed to that point—and don’t for a minute think that my father wouldn’t have gotten him out of that mess if he’d known—he had to perpetrate this cruel deception instead? You should have told me, Giles!”
“You don’t know how much I agonized over that, how many times I convinced myself that something could have been done. But he was convinced that your father wouldn’t bail him out again.”
“But it was all right if my life was ruined?”
“I didn’t know about your being disowned, not until several years later. My father never mentioned it. I did keep in touch with him, you know. When I confronted him about it, he swore he hadn’t expected that either. And you weren’t ruined. I saw you a few years later, here in France. I was tempted to hail you, but since you appeared well and quite prosperous, I slithered off. That did end my worst agony for a while. You were always the question mark that weighed on my conscience until that day.”
“Appearances are deceiving, Giles.”
“Nonsense. I had no doubt that you would fare well, I just needed confirmation. You were always resourceful. There was nothing you couldn’t do if you set your mind to it. I idolized you. I wanted so much to be like you, but I just couldn’t cut it.”
“Two,” Sebastian said, “you not only ruined my life, you ruined my father’s.”
“The hell you say!” Giles gasped. “I have checked on our families. My father did stop gambling. With the money your father gave him to assuage his guilt, he managed to invest a little, has learned from his mistakes. But everyone at home is hale and hardy—”
“Good God, are you really that much of a fool? Did you find out in your ‘checking’ that my father has been estranged from his own mother since the duel? Did you find out he’s a
lso been estranged from your father? They haven’t spoken in all these years! And although Juliette did end up married to my brother, she’s made his life miserable.”
Giles had paled. “God, no, I didn’t know any of that.”
“Then you’re as much a failure as an investigator as you are as a friend!” Even John blanched over that slur, but Sebastian wasn’t finished. “What have you done all these years other than hide?”
“I’ve been raising my son,” Giles said quietly.
That gave Sebastian pause. “You had a son with that old woman you married?” he asked incredulously.
“No. I married Eleanor.”
Chapter 50
D ID YOU HAVE TO KNOCK HIM OUT AGAIN?” John complained. “His tale was just getting good.”
Sebastian didn’t reply.
“Should I wake him?” John asked.
“Go ahead, but if his jaw isn’t broken this time, I’ll just have to try again.”
John winced and left Giles where he was on the floor. “I know what you’re thinking,” John said after a moment. “He’s been happy all these years, married to the woman he loved, enjoying a son, while you’ve merely been amassing a fortune—”
“Do not trivialize the harm he’s done!” Sebastian cut in with a snarl. “I’m not the only one who was affected by what he and his father did.”
“He gave up the life he knew to save his father’s life,” John pointed out. “Some people might consider that noble.”
“Noble?” Sebastian snorted. “He pursued no other avenue of recourse. He went along with Cecil’s ridiculous plan, and the results were mind-boggling. And all the while he assumes everything is just fine, that no one else lost a bloody thing, all because of his sacrifice. By God, what sacrifice did he really make? He’s gone on with his life and even found peace and joy in it.”
Giles groaned, sat up, locked his gaze on Sebastian across the room. “Did you have to hit me again?”
“The other option was to cut your throat,” Sebastian said simply.