Sebastian studied that angry, grief-stricken face. The Marquis might be old, but there was nothing weak or feeble about either his determination or his powers of understanding. “So who do you think killed your wife, sir?”
An odd half smile touched the old man’s lips. “Do you realize you’re the first person who’s asked me that? I suppose it’s because everyone who doesn’t think the Prince killed Guinevere naturally assumes I did it.”
The Marquis moved on to the next rose. Sebastian waited, the sun warm on his shoulders, and after a moment the Marquis said, “They’ve refused to let me have Guinevere’s body. Did you know that? They say there’s some surgeon coming down from London. Someone they want to take a look at her.”
“Paul Gibson. He’s very good at this sort of thing. He’d like your permission to do a complete autopsy.”
Anglessey glanced around. “Why?”
Sebastian met the old man’s pained, haggard gaze. “Because Lady Anglessey wasn’t killed last night. She was killed sometime yesterday afternoon and her body moved to the Yellow Cabinet in time for the Prince to find her.”
An angry light flared in the old man’s eyes. “What is this? Some trick to throw suspicion away from the Prince?”
“No. As a matter of fact, the Prince’s physicians have given it as their opinion that Lady Guinevere committed suicide.”
“Suicide! With a dagger sticking out of her back?”
“Exactly.” Sebastian hesitated, then added, “Except that the dagger isn’t what killed her. According to Gibson, she was probably dead several hours before she was stabbed.”
“Good God. What are you suggesting?”
Sebastian shook his head. “We don’t know how she died, sir. That’s why Gibson wants your permission to do a postmortem. Without one, it’s going to be difficult to ever understand what happened to your wife.”
There was a moment of silence, filled with the click-click of the Marquis’s secateurs and the distant cry of the gulls. Then he said, “Very well. Your Dr. Gibson has my permission.” He cast Sebastian a fierce glance over one shoulder. “But I want to be informed of everything. Do you hear me? No holding back out of consideration for my age or my health or any of that nonsense.”
“No holding back.”
Anglessey pressed his lips together, his nostrils flaring as he sucked in a quick, deep breath. “I know what people think of my marriage to Guinevere. An old man like me, taking to wife a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. They act like it was something disgraceful, something sordid. As if the forty-five-year difference in our ages made it somehow impossible for me to love her.”
He paused, his hands stilling as he stared off toward the end of the garden, his voice becoming hushed. “But I did love her, you know. Not because she was beautiful—although God knows she was. But she was so much more than that. She was…she was like a breath of fresh air that came into my life. So full of energy and passion. So bright, so determined to grasp life with both hands and make of it what she wanted—” He broke off and had to suck in a quick gasp of air before saying more quietly, “I can’t believe she’s dead.”
Sebastian waited a moment, then asked again, quietly, “Who do you think killed her, sir?”
Anglessey went to sink down on the weathered wooden bench sheltered by a nearby arbor, his hands in his lap. “Guinevere was my third wife,” he said, his voice once again firm, under control. “The first died within hours of presenting me with a stillborn son. The second was barren.”
Sebastian nodded. There was no need for the Marquis to explain further. He and Sebastian belonged to the same world, a world in which everyone understood only too clearly the need for a man in their position to produce a legitimate heir. Even at twenty-eight, Sebastian had already felt that pressure brought to bear upon himself, both by his father and by the weight of his own awareness of what he owed his house, his name.
“Ever since the death of my brother twenty years ago,” Anglessey was saying, “my heir has been my nephew. Bevan.”
The implications were inescapable. Sebastian studied the old man’s closed, angry face. “You think him capable of murder?”
“I think Bevan Ellsworth could kill someone who stood between him and what he considered his, yes. And as far as Bevan is concerned, my estates are essentially his. He took my marriage to Guinevere as a personal affront. He actually threatened to try to have the marriage set aside—as if he could.”
“Yet it’s been several years since your marriage. Why kill Lady Anglessey now?”
Anglessey let out a pained sigh. “Bevan’s expenses have always exceeded his income. Of course, as far as Bevan is concerned, the fault lies entirely with the inadequacy of his income rather than with the extravagance of his habits. He’s a very natty dresser, my nephew. He’s also sadly addicted to games of chance. As long as he was my heir, his creditors were willing to give him pretty much a free rein. I suspect things must have become rather uncomfortable when it became known that my wife was with child.”
“Yet the child might have been a girl,” Sebastian felt compelled to note, “in which case Bevan Ellsworth’s position as your heir would have remained secure.”
“The child might have been a girl,” Anglessey agreed. “But, frankly, I don’t think Bevan could afford to take that chance.”
Sebastian stood with the sun behind him, his own features thrown deliberately into shadow as he studied the older man’s face, set now in quiet thoughtfulness. The new lines scoured there by recent grief were easy to read, as was the vacant glaze of pain in the Marquis’s pale gray eyes and the heavy burden of sorrow that weighed down his slim, aged shoulders.
There was anger there, too, in the hard set of the jaw and the tight line of the thin lips. Rage at the sudden, unexpected loss of one so loved, at the selfish greed of the nephew he believed had stolen from him one held so dear. And yet…and yet Sebastian couldn’t shake the conviction that something else was going on here, too; something he was missing.
“When was the last time you saw your wife alive?” he asked suddenly.
Anglessey looked up, his eyes squinting as he stared into the sun. “Nearly ten days ago now.”
Sebastian drew a quick, sharp breath. “I don’t understand.”
“My wife hadn’t been well lately. Nothing serious, you understand.” A sad, wistful smile played around the old man’s lips. “It happens sometimes when a woman is in the family way. She was planning to come down to Brighton with me. She always enjoyed the weeks we spent here each summer. But in the end she decided she couldn’t face all those hours in a closed, swaying carriage. She stayed home.”
“Home?”
“That’s right.” The Marquis’s hand tightened around his secateurs as he pushed to his feet again. “The doctors thought the sea air would do me good, so she insisted I come without her. We were hoping she’d feel well enough to follow in a week or two. But until last night, I thought Guinevere was in London.”
Chapter 11
At first it seemed just one more bizarre twist in a tangled, incomprehensible string of imperfectly understood events, that Anglessey should have believed his wife to be in London at the time of her death. But the more Sebastian thought about it, the more it made sense.
According to Paul Gibson, Lady Guinevere had been killed some six to eight hours before the Regent was discovered clutching her body in the Yellow Cabinet. At some point during that long afternoon, she had lain for hours, faceup, so that the blood had congealed and darkened her flesh to a vivid purple. Only then had a dagger been driven into her bare back and her body positioned enticingly on its side in preparation for the Regent’s amorous approach.