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Then the world steadied itself. Cassandra sat staring at nothing, and everything was the same and would never be the same again.
Lord Charles had shot himself. No. Lord Charles was the most cheerful, warmest man he had ever known. He always had a kind word and a smile. He went out of his way to help others, and never let a penny rest in his pocket if someone else needed it more.
“Why?” The word hardly made it out of his choked throat.
“I don’t know. He left no note. After he died, I learned he’d had financial problems, but you gave him enough money to fix that.”
“Yes.”
Money. What in blazes had the money been good for? For too long, Joshua had believed money could solve all problems, but every time he thought he was protected, life went and threw something else at him to prove, yet again, that he was wrong.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said and immediately wished the question back.
She had written to tell him that her father had died in a riding accident. Invited him to visit the estate that he had inherited.
Instead, he sat alone in Scotland and mourned the best man he had ever known. He had sent money, Newell, and a cat. Bloody hell. He deserved to be pilloried.
“I didn’t tell anyone,” she said.
“Your mother?”
“She doesn’t know. None of them know. You mustn’t tell them.”
She hugged her knees, her cheek laid on them so her hair listed to one side. She looked too young and innocent to carry this awful burden. Naive, he’d called her. Smug, he’d called her.
He moved to sit beside her on the settee. She lowered her legs and let him take her hand.
“What do you mean, none of them know? You carry this alone?”
She played with his fingers and spoke in bursts. “He did it in the second stable, the empty one. There was a storm, so I suppose the thunder masked the noise. A groom found him before dawn and told the housekeeper. She couldn’t wake Mama because…Well. Because. So she woke me instead. I insisted on seeing him. I shouldn’t have. Something tore inside me and I went empty. I sent the groom to fetch Sir Gordon Bell—he’s the magistrate and Papa’s dear friend—and I told him that no one must ever know the truth, and he agreed. If everyone knew, we would have…we would have had to bury him at a crossroads with a stake through his heart. My father. Buried like…I couldn’t let that happen.”
She was tracing the lines on his palm, but he doubted she saw a thing. He did not want to hear this but he had to.
“We paid the coroner five hundred pounds so there’d be no public inquest. That is,youpaid him five hundred pounds.” She sounded almost jolly. And he had accused her of pasting a smug smile over her emotions. Bloody hell. “The doctor refused payment, but you bought him a new carriage and horses anyway. You bought the groom a small cottage near Margate, and he moved away and married his sweetheart. The housekeeper Mrs. Greenway didn’t want anything either, but you paid for her two nephews to go to Shrewsbury Grammar School. They’re doing well. You are generous in your bribes.”
“And your family?”
She had been twenty when she did all this. It had been a month after they married, and he couldn’t even remember her face. Where in blazes was her mother?
“They don’t need to know. By the time they woke up, it was all arranged. They had moved Papa, and Mrs. Greenway and the doctor washed him, and the doctor said his face was smashed in the fall so they had to keep the coffin closed.”
A single tear fell onto his hand. She looked up at him. Her eyes were green and wet, the lashes clumped in little spikes.
“He knew, Joshua,” she said. “He worried about dying before I could marry and keep everyone secure, and I laughed at him and said there was no reason he would die. But the whole time he was planning to do it, and that’s why he wanted us to wed. He even transferred his property to you, so the Crown could not seize it. We killed him, you and I. If we never married, he would never have done it, and his demons would have gone away. And now he’s buried in the churchyard, which is sacrilege, and we did this crime and I try to do the right thing but I can never atone for that. I get so angry at him sometimes.”
Her logic was wrong, utterly wrong, but emotions had a way of making the worst logic seem right.
“Lord Charles said the same thing to me, when he asked me to marry you,” he told her. “He said that Charlie’s death left you all unprotected. I thought he was worrying unnecessarily.”
Tears ran down her cheeks. He fumbled for a kerchief and wiped them away, trying to be gentle, but feeling rough and clumsy. She let him. Because she was taking care of everyone and no one took care of her. He pulled her against him and she slumped against his chest. He stroked her hair and wished he could take away her pain.
“It was his decision,” he said. “He must have been hurting and you gave him peace.”
She said nothing. He held her close and breathed in her fragrance, breathed through the tightness in his chest, the burning in the back of his throat. Cassandra had borne it all and he had mocked her. And Lord Charles: He would have done anything for Lord Charles, if only he had known. But Lord Charles was always so cheerful and congenial, even while he grieved for Charlie. Covering it all up with a pleasant, polite smile.
There was a woman who might know the full story, but he could never tell Cassandra about her. Cassandra still believed her father had been faithful to his wife. He would not take that from her too.
The poor thing. He had been so annoyed by her self-righteousness, her self-possession. It had been easier to think of her as a good, boring girl with polite smiles and petty concerns. He almost wished he didn’t know this about her: That she was so much more.
