A Dangerous Collaboration (Veronica Speedwell #4)(100)

“You knew.”

“No. I only suspected. I always thought it too good to be true when she chose me rather than you,” he said simply. “I had seen her looking at you when she thought she was unobserved. Do you remember that summer? How we pushed one another, spurring our horses to impress her? Swimming further, jumping higher? We were ridiculous. And when she said she wanted me, me, I was exalted. It was only later that the doubts set in.”

“Doubts?” I asked.

“How could she choose me when she might have had him?” he asked.

I said nothing and waited for Tiberius to answer. It was the opportunity he had anticipated through the long, cold nights of the past three years. It was the chance to tell Malcolm the truth, once and for all, to exult in his victory at last.

Tiberius held Malcolm’s gaze. “There is no mystery, my friend. She loved you.”

It was a lie told for the noblest of reasons, and in that moment of duplicity, I had never counted Tiberius higher in my esteem.

“She did not come to me,” Tiberius went on. “My God, man. I would have had the decency to tell you if she had. I would never have let you suffer these years never knowing if she were alive or dead.”

“I realize that now,” Malcolm said. “I knew that summer I was her second choice. She was luminous when she looked at you,” he added with a nod towards Tiberius. “But I understood her. I knew she wanted, above all else, security and contentment. You were exciting but dangerous. You would never have let yourself be ruled by a woman, no matter how much you loved her. Rosamund knew she could have her way with me. I would have done anything for her, and I was content with that,” he insisted. “She did love me. We would have made a good life together and I would have cared for her. I knew something had happened to make her decide so suddenly about marrying me, but I did not question my good fortune. Not at first.”

He paused and Mertensia, with Stoker’s blessing, offered him something else to drink, a sip of hot whisky this time. He swallowed it down and resumed his tale. “As the wedding drew nearer, I saw how changed she was. There was a hectic sort of gaiety to her, a forced happiness, feverish. And when the harpsichord arrived . . .” He paused again. “It did not take a genius to piece together what had happened.”

“I ought not to have sent it,” Tiberius said. “It was an ungentlemanly thing to give that to another man’s bride.”

“She loved it,” Malcolm said dully. “As she loved you. I thought I could make her forget you. I thought we would have children and be happy together. So I married her. And that day she simply vanished and all I could think was that she had run away to be with you. There was no note and her things were gone. No one could make a case for harm to have come to her, so there was this limbo, this terrible, awful limbo where I had a bride but no wife. There were no boats missing, so how could she have left St. Maddern’s? But the island was searched and she was not here either. I even hired a private inquiry agent to follow you when you returned to London,” he told Tiberius. “But there was never any proof that you had seen her again, and no matter how hard they searched, there was no trace of her to be found. It was as if she simply vanished.” His lips twisted wryly. “We Cornish believe in piskies and faeries and mermaids. I half wondered sometimes if there might have been truth to some of those ludicrous old legends. It did not seem possible that she might have disappeared. But she had. And so I got on with things as best I could. I did everything I was supposed to do as master of the Isle, but it was a half-life at most. I was sleepwalking, you understand. Until I found the bag.”

His eyes were bleak as he took another draft of the hot whisky. “When I discovered it, I knew then that I had been a fool. Rosamund might have abandoned me, but she would not have left in her wedding gown without so much as a change of linen. Something had happened to her—some accident or worse.”

He lifted his head, looking at each of us in turn. “And I began to wonder who might have wanted to harm her. I lay awake at night and I could imagine a motive for everyone who had ever known her,” he went on. “I drove myself halfway to madness and back imagining every possible scenario, every unthinkable crime that might have been done to her. And I realized I had to discover the truth before the not knowing destroyed me. So I invited you all here to help me. I thought that if we were gathered under one roof, here where it all happened, someone might say something or see something. I thought the truth must be here, just out of reach if only we could find it.”

“Did you know Helen was a fraud?” I asked. “She does not speak to ghosts.”

He made a gesture of dismissal. “I suspected as much, but I wanted to believe in her. I wanted to believe it was possible that Rosamund could communicate, that she could somehow make herself known to us. If there was the slightest chance she could do so, then I meant to take it.”

Tiberius sat in his chair with the solemnity of a judge while Mertensia continued to pat her brother’s hand.

“I told no one what I meant to do. I knew Caspian and Helen would come because they are Romillys when all is said and done. They would come for the memory of Lucian and perhaps to further Caspian’s chances to become my heir,” he added with a thin, slightly cynical smile. “And I knew you would come, Tiberius, because you were too bound up in Rosamund’s story. When you asked if you could bring your fiancée, I thought perhaps I had been wrong after all about your feelings for Rosamund. I told myself that you were coming solely as a friend to me, and when I saw you, I realized how much the past few years had taken from me. Not just Rosamund, but you and the friendship I had cherished for half my life.”