George’s voice was calm and soft—ah, what memories it evoked!
“What did you tell him, Imogen?” he asked.
“That I k-k-killed Dicky,” she wailed.
“And what else?”
“What else is there to tell?” She hardly recognized her own voice. “There is nothing else. In the whole wide world, there is only that. I killed him.”
“Imogen.” It was Ben’s voice this time. “There is a great deal more than just that.”
“No, there is n-n-not,” she said, shaking her head from side to side. “There is only that.”
From behind her, Flavian cupped her jaw in his hands.
“One must ask,” he said with his sighing, rather bored voice—it was deliberate, she thought, to try to soothe her with normality. “Does this Hardford fellow love you, perchance, Imogen? Or does he merely like to play heavy-handed lord of the manor?”
She opened her eyes and lifted her head. “It does not matter,” she said. “Oh, but he is not heavy-handed or dictatorial or obnoxious, though I thought he was at first.”
“And do you perchance love him?” Flavian asked.
“I cannot,” she said, drawing her hands free of Ralph’s and Hugo’s arms and setting the heels of them against her eyes. “I will not. You all know that.”
Ralph and Flavian resumed their seats. Hugo set an arm about her shoulders and drew her head down onto his shoulder.
“Why are you so upset?” he asked. “I mean, why are you so upset?”
“Someone else betrayed him,” she said. “Dicky, I mean. He was never meant to come home alive from the Peninsula. Someone betrayed him to the French.”
And she poured out the story of the smugglers and Mr. Ratchett and James Mawgan and her husband’s valet and how Percy had confronted them all when no one else would since Dicky’s time and had pursued the matter recklessly and relentlessly until he had exposed the truth and the two men had been arrested and were awaiting trial. She had no idea if her story made sense.
Vincent was still patting her thigh when she had finished.
“I came here early,” she said, lowering her hands to her lap. “I needed to feel safe. I needed to— I needed—”
“Us,” Flavian said. “We all need us too, Imogen. You can rest here. We all can.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But it must be horribly late. I should let you all go to bed. I am exhausted if you are not. Thank you. I do love you all.”
George, smiling gently, was holding out a hand for hers.
“Come,” he said. “I’ll see you to your door. You know you can always come here, Imogen.”
“I also know,” she said, getting to her feet, “that I must live my own life. And I will. This is just a brief setback, like Vincent’s panic attacks. Good night.”
She squared her shoulders and looked at them each in turn. She did not even notice that none of them was making a move to follow her from the room.
*
Percy did not know why he was angry, but he was. No, not angry exactly. Disgruntled. All out of sorts. In as bad a mood as he could possibly be without actually snapping at everyone who came in his path.
Jealous.
But that was preposterous. Why would he be jealous of a collection of men he did not even know? Men who called themselves by the pretentious name of Survivors—with a capital S, if you please? Wasn’t everyone a survivor? Wasn’t he? What gave them exclusive right to the word? And how much could they love her when a number of them—he could not remember if it was all—had gone off and married other women.
But it was to them she had gone running—in the middle of the night without a word to him. Even her note had been addressed to her aunt.
And now he was playing messenger boy and deliveryman combined. In the carriage with him were letters from Lady Lavinia, Mrs. Ferby, his mother, Beth, Lady Quentin, and Miss Wenzel. It was ridiculous. If many more people had written, he would have needed a wagon to pull behind. And there was a large trunk of her belongings in the boot of the carriage, leaving hardly any room for his own luggage.
And here he was arriving at Penderris Hall, which was just as large and imposing as he had expected and considerably closer to the ever-present cliffs than Hardford Hall was, and he was having second—or was it forty-second—thoughts about the wisdom of coming here but it was too late to turn back because his arrival seemed to have been noticed and the main doors had opened and a tall man with elegantly graying hair—damn him!—was stepping outside to see who the devil was arriving when he had not been invited and Percy could see that he was the Duke of Stanbrook. He had seen the man a few times at the House of Lords.