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The woman raised her eyes. She was pretty, her eyes a lovely blue, but her face was bone-white, her lips colorless.
“He said we would have a fortune,” she said. “Enough money to go to the country and open a tavern of our own. He said that he’d marry me and we would be rich.”
She dropped her eyes again, quietly rocking.
“It’s the butler, my lord,” Pynch said from behind him. “Mr. Horn’s butler—the one I talked to.”
“Pynch, go get help,” Jasper ordered. “And see that Horn is all right.”
“All right?” The woman laughed as Pynch ran from the room. “He was the one who did this. Stabbed my man and shoved him back here like so much rubbish.”
Jasper stared blankly at her. “What?”
“My man found a letter,” the woman whispered. “A letter to a French gentleman. My man said Mr. Horn sold secrets to the French during the war in the Colonies. He said we would make a fortune selling the letter back to the master. And then we could open a tavern in the country.”
Jasper squatted by her. “He tried to blackmail Horn?”
She nodded. “We’d be rich, he said. I hid behind the curtain when he asked to talk to Mr. Horn. To tell him about the letter. But Mr. Horn . . .”
Her words trailed into a low keening.
“Matthew did this?” Jasper finally grasped the full horror. The butler’s head lolled on his bloody chest.
“My lord,” Pynch said from behind him.
Jasper looked up. “What?”
“The other servants say Mr. Horn is nowhere to be found.”
“He went looking for the letter,” the woman said.
Jasper frowned at her. “I thought your man, the butler, had it.”
“Nay.” The woman shook her head. “He was too smart to have it on him.”
“Where is it, then?”
“The master won’t find it,” the woman said dreamily. “I hid it well. I sent it to my sister in the country.”
“Good God,” Jasper said. “Where is your sister? She might be in danger.”
“He won’t look there,” the woman whispered. “My man never spoke her name. He only said who had told him to look through the papers in Mr. Horn’s desk.”
“Who?” Jasper whispered in dawning horror.
The woman looked up and smiled sweetly. “Mr. Pynch.”
“My lord, Mr. Horn knows I am your valet.” Pynch was white as a sheet. “If he knows that—”
Jasper was already scrambling to his feet, racing desperately for the door, but he still heard the rest of Pynch’s sentence.
“—then he will think that you have the letter.”
The letter. The letter he didn’t have. The letter Matthew would naturally think was in his house. His house where his darling wife had no doubt returned by this time. Alone and unprotected and thinking Matthew was his friend.
Dear God in heaven. Melisande.
“MY MOTHER IS an invalid,” Matthew Horn said to Melisande, and she nodded because she didn’t know what else to do. “She cannot be moved at all, let alone flee to France.”
