“He knew?”
“Only that they stretched their necks, nothing more.” She motioned to the desk. “And correspondence? I receive it by the handful from others.”
He noticed an unopened stack in the corner and looked for an opener.
She waved. “My letter opener has been missing since last summer. I make Tom come in and open my mail.” Her mouth curved. “The best thing, losing that opener. You should see what he can do with his tongue. Oh, don’t look that way, Gabriel, Tom is twenty-two, plenty old enough to satisfy your absurd rules.”
He split the top missive with his finger.
“Your brother is nearing that age, is he not? Jeremy was always so promising.”
“You are nothing if not clever, Melissande,” he said calmly. “Say another word about Jeremy, and I will complete the Middlesex murderer’s final task for him.”
He read the first line of the note from some fawning admirer, expecting her to retort. When she didn’t, he looked up. Her face had gone white. A sliver of unease traveled down his spine. He finished reading the note, and by the time he was through, she had regained some of her color.
Her fingers shook as she ran a hand along the side of her hair, smoothing the imaginary escaped tendrils back into place. “What type of list did you say you needed?”
He twirled a quill and leaned back. “So compliant, all of a sudden? You’ll make me think you cowed. Melissande Dentry, cowed.”
“Mind your manners, Gabriel,” she said calmly, with obviously more calm than she felt.
“Melissande, tut tut. You don’t hold the power here.”
“Even if you don’t want your past uncovered?”
“I rebuffed your blackmail attempt at age twenty when you found me. It will hardly work now. I can simply play your game. I took what you so kindly ‘offered.’ A sixteen-year-old boy? Who would believe otherwise?” The bitterness and disgust made him twitch, and he moved his feet to the right. He smiled, a stock smile that he had learned from the master, one full of innuendo and guile. “Easy enough to make you the deviant in this story. Especially since all of your co-conspirators are dead.”
“Our journals—”
He idly twirled the quill again, not feeling the ease he was trying to project. “There is only yours left. And I wonder what it shows? No doubt it is no credit to you. There is little that could be, if it is of your creation.”
Her lips tightened. Fear and anger making her deceivingly lovely face twist into petulant lines.
He tossed the quill on the desk. “I grow tired of this. Whatever your ignorance of the fates of your ‘friends,’ you have obviously heard of the Middlesex murderer, judging by your reaction. I’ve never seen you so scared, Lady Dentry.”
“I’m sure you are enjoying the moment, Gabriel.”
He tipped his head back. “It would surely behoove you to think so.”
The dark thought continued to swirl in his mind that he was doing exactly what Marietta had accused him of—using the tricks he hated. “Now give me the list.”
She picked up the quill and dipped it. “I was so disappointed when we returned from London and you had disappeared. The club was never quite the same.”
“Good.”
“Your father was never the same either.”
He said nothing.
“I always suspected he helped you and your brother leave. I punished him for it. I told you that I would.”
“He accepted the consequences.” Gabriel remembered their conversation. His father’s anguish. His own mortification and anger, pushed onto a new target. There was still a part of him horrified that he hadn’t stayed and saved his father the pain. One victim to take the place of more.
“He was the one person I couldn’t directly touch.” She smiled humorlessly at his surprise. “A bit of a bluff on my part. Your father was too close to my husband. Relied on far more than I,” she said bitterly. “Still, I made things…uncomfortable for him. I’m quite good at that.”
Gabriel slit the next note in her stack with his finger, not answering.
“You were always so fun. Deporting yourself like royalty. Full of knowledge garnered from your mother and with all the secrets of your father. Running around the estate with all of your friends, from low to high, and every female enraptured by you. A ravishing prince. I’ve seen no one like you since.”
