Page 74 of Secrets of the Heart

“Well?” Rachel said somewhat defiantly. “It is the truth.”

“Yes. It is. I think someone far more clever than our friend Birkshaw is behind this.”

“And when you said that to Anthony back there, that perhaps it was not aimed at him, what you meant was that by using Anthony he was aiming it at you.”

Michael nodded. “I was foolish not to pay more heed to the highwayman’s warning. I was so far from discovering anything that I felt sure no villain would have seriously thought he was in danger from me. I wrote the warning off as the highwayman’s wanting money. I came to London only because as long as there was even a possibility, however remote, that someone might harm me, I feared that he might try to do it through you.”

“And he did work through me, didn’t he?” Rachel said. “Why else would he have sent Anthony to visit me? He must have hoped that it would reawaken your dislike and mistrust of the man.”

“Yes, and I fell right into the trap.”

They walked along for a few more moments in silence before Rachel said in a troubled voice, “Michael…if some person is planning all this, and if he is trying to make you believe that Anthony killed his wife, then he is using him as a sort of decoy, isn’t he? To distract you and get you working on this murder instead of tracking him down?”

“It would seem so,” Michael agreed.

“What a monstrous thing to do!” Rachel exclaimed. “That would mean he has taken an innocent man and made it appear that he is guilty of murder. Anthony could be put to trial, even hanged. And it would mean that this criminal killed the footman, as well, because that is the primary piece of proof against Anthony. And he would also have killed Anthony’s poor wife, or he would not have been able to set up the whole thing.”

Michael nodded. “I suppose that Mrs. Birkshaw could have simply died from natural causes, as everyone believed at the time, and that our villain simply saw the opportunity to turn my suspicions against Birkshaw. But certainly he would have had to kill the footman in order to leave the suicide note implicating Anthony. And, in all probability, he engineered the whole thing. I would suspect he hired the footman to kill Mrs. Birkshaw, then killed him to throw suspicion on Birkshaw.”

“What a heartless, cold-blooded man he must be!” Rachel cried in a low voice. “To destroy people like that—not even out of hate or anger but merely to throw you off the scent! It is abominable.”

“Yes, I agree. The man is inhumanly cold and calculating.”

They continued to their house, thinking their own thoughts.

But later that night, as they were sitting in the music room after supper, as Rachel was idling over the keys of the piano, lazily picking out a tune while Michael read, she turned to him and said, “I am sorry, Michael.”

“What?” He looked up blankly from his book. “Sorry? About what?”

“That he has used me to hurt you,” she said. “Whoever is doing these things. That he used Anthony to divert you.”

Michael shrugged. “It is scarcely your fault that his mind works that way.”

“No, but it is my fault that you had reason to be jealous of Anthony. It is because of me that you dislike him.” She paused, then asked tentatively, “Are you indeed that jealous of him?”

Michael brows shot up. “Jealous? Of course I am jealous of him.” His voice roughened, and he stood up abruptly. “It scores my soul to know that he is the love of your life.” Though he knew that Rachel did no longer love Anthony, he could not forget that Anthony, not he, was the only man to hold her heart.

“But I do not love him!” Rachel exclaimed, aghast. “I have not loved him for—oh, years and years. I don’t even remember when I got over feeling the hurt. Frankly, I am not entirely sure that I ever loved him. I didn’t really know him, you know. We were always surrounded by parents and friends and—well, it was never a natural situation. I had no way of knowing what sort of man he really was. All I knew was that my heart fluttered whenever I saw him. It was probably as my mother said, merely an infatuation.”

“There is no way of knowing, I suppose, since you were not allowed to follow your heart.” Michael was turned away, not looking at her.

“There is no feeling in me for him any longer,” Rachel told him. “When he came here to ask for your help, I wondered what I would feel when I saw him, but the truth was, I felt nothing. Whatever I felt for him, love or infatuation, it died long ago. And, believe me, nothing I have seen of him since that day has awakened any renewal of it.”

“Rachel!” Michael strode across the room to her and wrapped his arms around her, lifting her off her feet and kissing her fiercely.

Then he pulled away and swept her up into his arms and carried her up the stairs to her bedroom, not caring if any of the servants saw them. All he could think of was Rachel and his need to be inside her, to kiss and caress her until both of them were teetering on the edge of the dark vortex of passion.

They made love hungrily, passionately, like people too long denied the pleasures of their bodies, coming together at last in a wild cataclysm. Afterward they slept, curled together.

Michael awoke some time later, stirred to consciousness by the chill in the air. He got up and pulled the covers up over both of them. Rachel murmured in her sleep and snuggled up against him. He curled his arm around her and kissed the top of her head, feeling a happiness and peace he had never known before.

He lay there in the dark for a long time, thinking about love and jealousy and times past, of enemies and friends, and when at last he fell asleep, he knew what he would do.

“I think I may know how to solve this investigation,” Michael said the next morning over breakfast.

Rachel stared at him, his words chasing away the last cobwebs of sleep. “What? How?”

“We may be able to smoke out the criminal.”