‘He was a smuggler.’
‘Certainly.’
‘A spy?’
He let out a great gust of breath. ‘A very dangerous one. Whether his wife knows as much, I could not tell you, Viola. Such men are discouraged by their masters from idle domestic chatter, shall we say? But he’s dead now, so any secret knowledge he may have had can no longer threaten… anyone.’
She could hardly believe that they were having this conversation, as the flames illuminated his disturbingly impassive face for a second and then it was concealed in the shadows when he turned away from her a little. Perhaps he could not meet her gaze, and no wonder. This man was supposed to keep her boyssafe. This did not sound anything like safety. ‘Unless he kept records.’
The response was terrifyingly swift and sure. ‘He did, but there is no need to suffer the least anxiety over them. They have all been destroyed.’
‘The only way you could be positive of that…’
‘Is if I made certain of their destruction myself, yes. I did. I burned them, one by one; it took hours, and then I broke the ashes into pieces so no shred remained that could be read.’
She was silent for a moment. ‘Julia did not tell me how he died. The topic did not arise.’ She felt removed from herself, as if in some fever dream, and her voice echoed unpleasantly in her own ears.
‘He suffered an unfortunate accident. He liked his own wares a little too much – and so he fell down the cellar steps on his premises and broke his neck. I do not think it came as a great surprise to anyone.’
‘Not to you, at any rate, it seems.’
Again, the pregnant silence stretched. ‘Viola, are you asking me if I killed him? Because before you do, you might wish to reflect upon whether you really want to hear the answer.’
‘That sounds like answer enough to me. You did; you killed him.’ She was unnaturally calm.
‘Very well. Yes.’
The confession of murder dropped into the quiet room like a stone into a pool, and when she said nothing in immediate response – what was there to say? – he looked at her with what she began to recognise as desperation, which scared her more than all the rest. At last, he had been completely honest with her, and it was horrifying.
‘Viola, I had my reasons for what I did, though I cannot share them yet. If you are disgusted at my actions, knowing just a tiny fraction of them, I cannot blame you. I am disgusted myself. I have done terrible things – as you once rightly said to me, I’d started doing them even before you and I first met. There are matters that lie far heavier on my conscience than sending Citizen Lesmire to his grave. But I will not ask you to accept any of this with complaisance. You should not. All I will ask is for you to be patient a little while longer. I need to tell you much more than I have – but I cannot yet. I am not deliberately being mysterious – I simply cannot. You heard me say that men such as Lesmire are not supposed to discuss their affairs, even with their loved ones. Especially with them, and on pain of death. The same applies to me – for now.’
‘We’ve spoken of this before,’ she said, suddenly bone-tired. ‘You promised me you would not put the boys in any danger. That was all I asked of you, I think, and it does not seem like so very much.’
He was insistent; he took her hands and gripped them with painful intensity. ‘And I won’t. I haven’t and I won’t. Nor you. I’d sooner cut off my own right arm than harm any of you. I’m waiting for a letter that has been promised me, and when I have it, my situation will be different. As soon as it arrives, I will go and see my brother, and put a stop to his threats forever, so that you may be entirely easy in your mind.’
‘Are you going to kill him too? Because Richard, if that is your scheme, I must think you have run mad.’ She felt hysterical laughter bubbling up inside her, and only just managed to suppress it. ‘There is no safety in that for any of us; you could hang. He is your own brother, whatever else he is. I suppose you have been lucky before, with Lesmire and perhaps with others of whom I know nothing, but you cannot count on that. You must surely be able to see as much, however far you have gone to dark places where I cannot follow.’
‘It is true that I have been in dark places,’ he said sombrely. ‘But I hope to put all that behind me for good, and live in the light, with you. And I will make all sorts of threats to Tarquin, I am sure I will have to, just to get his attention, but I shall not kill him. I assure you I am not mad. I am saner than I have ever been in my life. I know exactly how much I have to lose now, when I had nothing before to live for.’
She could have told him that he had far more to lose than he knew. She wondered if he suspected it. But he had said nothing on the subject, and she did not. It was not the time. She snuffed out the candle at her bedside, and they spoke no more, though she did not sleep for hours and thought that he lay awake at her side too, with God knows what thoughts running through his mind.
35
A few days later, Lord Ventris’s horse made his weary way up the drive that led to Mr Tarquin Armstrong’s home in the Lincolnshire Wolds, Lindsey Manor. The poor beast had been plodding valiantly on for hours through the chill afternoon, but his pace increased a little now; perhaps he sensed that a warm stable was near, and a rest. He’d earned it.
Richard had not been here for years, and noticed signs of neglect even in the gathering dusk. Broken fences, overgrown rides, rank pasture. It was a rich, fertile hill-country, one from which it should be possible to make a good living, but that would require putting back more than one took out, at least at first – a concept which his late father had not understood, and Tarquin emphatically did not either. The Jacobean house had come into this branch of the Armstrong family through his late grandmother, his father’s mother, and had been short-sightedly managed by men who did not appreciate it as it deserved for as long as anyone could remember, so that the damage ran deep. This had been his own home once, in his boyhood, but he would not think to call it that now; his home was where Viola was, or he hoped it would be. He’d never been particularly happy here, nor had his poor mother. He wished nothing more than to make his stay here now as brief as possible.
He still remembered his way about the old place, and half an hour later, after he’d taken good care of his footsore mount, he was making his way silently through the house to the library – a pretentious name for a room which had always been lined with crumbling books that nobody ever read. The estate was plainly not over-provided with servants; he’d met nobody since his arrival, which suited him perfectly. Despite what he’d said to Viola, he was quite prepared to kill Tarquin if he had to. But he hoped the necessity could be avoided; he needed no more deaths on his conscience. He had a thick letter in his pocket, heavy with official seals, and he had permission to show it to anyone who might need to see it. His brother was among that number, though he didn’t know it yet.
If Tarquin’s wife was here, she’d likely be in some comfortless private parlour, sitting sewing or reading, amusing herself as best she could. Mr Armstrong was not the sort of man who spent his evenings chatting sedately with a woman – certainly not his own wife. Richard expected to find his brother doing nothing at all, nodding over his cups just as their father had each night, and he was not disappointed. Tarquin was there alone, dozing, reminding him suddenly and unexpectedly of Edward doing the same at Winterflood so many years ago. They were all Armstrongs, after all. The squeak of the ill-oiled library door woke him, and he sat up startled in his shabby armchair, blinking owlishly at the unexpected sight of his only sibling, the black sheep of the family. Richard closed the door behind him, and locked it with the key he’d taken from the other side of the lock, out in the hall. ‘Brother,’ he said coolly, pocketing it and advancing across the dusty chamber. ‘I hear you’ve been busy.’
It seemed to take Mr Armstrong an inordinate amount of time to gather his wits, such as they were. ‘In York,’ Richard prompted, his lip curling. ‘Bursting into people’s homes, making all kinds of melodramatic threats, like some villain in a pantomime. Boo! I say. You do nothing but make yourself ridiculous.’
They glared at each other, with rancour vivid and alive on both sides. There was a certain resemblance between them, in the colour of hair and eyes rather than in any particular lineament of face, or mannerism. But Richard’s skin was tanned from exposure to the elements, whereas his brother did not look like a sporting man, unless gaming and drinking and wenching should be considered sports.
‘I am not the one who is ridiculous,’ Tarquin sneered at last, recovering himself a little and sitting up straighter. ‘So, you’ve married the widow. Felicitations! I daresay she is happy enough to have her bed warmed after all these years, and doesn’t much care who by. But it won’t do you any good, or her. I mean to expose her, and her bastard brats. Are they yours, I wonder? I’ve not seen them, but I hear they look like Armstrongs rather than mongrel scum, so I expect they are your get.’
‘Shut up,’ Richard said emotionlessly. ‘Stop posturing before you say something that prompts me to knock your silly head off and use it as a football. There can be no legal proof that what you say is true, and you should know it. In law and custom, a man’s children are those he accepts as his, even if all the world knows different. Edward lived with the boys for eight long years, and with their mother; he made wills in their favour to provide for their future. He stood in church at their side, before his God, Sunday after Sunday. The older boy bears his name. Your efforts are preposterous, and everyone will know that they come only from your pathetic jealousy. You thought the dukedom yours – it never will be now. Get over it, can’t you, and live your own life with what you have?’
