“What happened?” I coaxed.
The lip curled again. “Lorenzo happened. He insisted we meet privately, which I tried very hard to avoid. But he cornered me in the library after tea and said that we would have to be married. I was terrified, you understand. He was so insistent that his honour was involved. I hadthought of it as an act of pleasure, entered into by willing participants. He thought of it as some sort of contract, a promise! There was no time to dissuade him. I begged him to wait a day or so until I could break the news to Mamma, and he agreed to keep it secret. I had so little time to plan, but he left me no choice. I don’t think I intended to do what I did, not then. I simply wrote him a little note, telling him that I knew the fossil would be in danger and that I would help him to excavate it before it could be lost. He would tell no one else. That was how deep his sense of honour went. He knew he was violating the wishes of his host, so he would do this secretly. He went along to the cliffs, biddable as a lamb. I teased him when he got there about carrying love notes in his pocket. He handed over the note I sent him and swore he had told no one of his intention to go out. And then he asked me once more to marry him.”
“You refused him,” I said.
“I was not given the chance,” she replied. “Lorenzo told me that there was simply no other option. That as much as he wished me to marry James, he could not permit it.Could not permit it.As if it were up to him! He had decided his honour must be satisfied, and that could only happen if he confessed everything to James and married me himself. Lorenzo spoke of the sacrifice he was willing to make, the sacrifice.” She fairly spat the word. “As if I were some nobody he had plucked from the gutter. I was good enough to marry a baronet with forty thousand acres but not good enough for the d’Ambrogios. He told me how his mother would weep at the marriage, how it would affect his little sister’s chances of a suitable match when her elder brother had married an untitled Englishwoman, but it must be endured. We were going to live with them, his family in Italy, and suddenly I understood what the rest of my life would be like, in a country where I did not speak the language, on sufferance, the little English whore Lorenzo had defiled and married because it was the proper thing to do.”
Angry tears sprang to her eyes. “I did not mean to do it, not even then. I swear it. But when he kept repeating how awful it would be but that it must be done to satisfy his honour as a gentleman, I could not bear it. I knew there was no way to persuade him to keep silent and let me marry James. He thought it disloyal. He was shocked I even suggested it, and I saw then something I had never thought to see in his eyes—contempt. He hated me a little for being willing to deceive James so easily, and yet he still swore he would marry me. Because hemust.”
The words fell like stones from her lips. “And before I knew what I was doing, I put my hands in front of me, like this,” she said, holding out her arms, “and I pushed him. I did not even push him very hard. He simply was not expecting it. He flew backwards, into the darkness of the storm. He gave a short little cry, and then I heard the sound of his body hitting the rocks below. I hear it still. It is a terrible sound, the breaking of a body. I did not intend for it to happen, but it was the only way.”
She lapsed into silence then and we watched the sea rising and listened to the cries of the gulls, so like a keening human voice.
“Did you know someone was bent upon avenging Lorenzo’s death?” I asked after a little while.
She nodded, the wind teasing her hair. “James received a set of cuttings, just as Tiberius did. The message was slightly different. He wasn’t told he was next, only that vengeance for Lorenzo was coming.”
“Did he share them with you?”
Her expression was mocking. “Share them? My dear Veronica, James would never burden a genteel female mind with something so distasteful. No, he hid them, like a naughty child. I needed the address of the headmaster of our boys’ school and James was out. So I looked in his blotter and there the cuttings were. I was horrified that someone might have guessed what I had done until I saw the envelope. Theywere addressed to James, not to me. My secret was still safe. At least I thought so—until Tiberius invited us here.”
“Why come? It was a terrible risk,” I pointed out.
“Staying away would have been a greater one. I had to know who was sending the wretched things. Clearly it was someone who didn’t realise what I had done, but there was the terrible possibility they might discover it somehow. That is the worst of it, you know. Being responsible for such an act means you are always looking over your shoulder, wondering if there was something you missed, something you forgot. Something that might come back to haunt you.”
“When did you realise Beatrice was Lorenzo’s sister?” I asked.
“Almost as soon as I met her. There was something unsettling about her I could not put my finger on. We shared a train compartment with them coming down, and I engaged her in conversation, trying to discover if we had met before. But it was not until we were at Cherboys that I saw it. When I cut her silhouette. I had done Lorenzo’s, you see. As my scissors moved around the curve of her image, something in the profile. And I knew, as suddenly and as surely as if she had told me herself. This was his little Star, his beloved Stella. And she had come to bring vengeance for him. I felt cold to my marrow because I understood if she had come for some innocent purpose, she would have made herself known to us. What would be more natural than to speak of him, to ask us to share the memories of the brother she had lost? The fact that she concealed her relationship to Lorenzo meant she was cunning. There was something too watchful about her. I saw her, scrutinising each of the men in turn—Tiberius, James, even Timothy Gresham. She wondered about each of them. But it never occurred to her to wonder about Elspeth. Or me.”
“A frequent oversight when one is hunting murderers,” I confirmed. “One often fails to consider the female can be deadlier than the male.”
“Yes, we can,” she said. “It was so terribly easy, you know. She dosed herself with that tonic for her heart, and it would be child’s play to introduce something lethal. I presumed Timothy would have a suitable substance at the dispensary, and I was right.”
“Strychnine,” I supplied.
“Yes. Used in small doses as a stimulant but entirely fatal in large amounts. And compounded into salts. The easiest thing in the world to tip into her bottle of tonic. A quick shake and they dissolved. The best part was that I needn’t be anywhere near when Beatrice poisoned herself. It would be entirely her own doing.”
Hardly so, but I was not prepared to argue the point with Augusta. She rose and gathered her hair into her net, pinning it as neatly as she could with the wind whipping around us. She paused and took a last look around, from the deep blue water stretching as far as the eye could see to the lowering grey skies just beginning to drop gentle rain upon the waves.
“Come along,” I said. “It is time to tell the others.”
I held out my hand for hers, intending to support her in what must be the most difficult conversation of her life.
“My sons,” she began, and for the first time, her voice broke. She clasped my hand tightly. “I cannot have them know what their mother is.”
“There are ways,” I began.
“There is one way,” she said, and she stepped near the edge.
“Do not jump!” I cried. “Augusta, your death will change nothing.”
A smile, sweet as a seraph’s, illuminated her face. “Oh, I did not mean mine.”
And with that, she jerked hard upon my arm as she pivoted, flinging me over the edge of the cliff towards oblivion.
CHAPTER
33
