A Dangerous Collaboration (Veronica Speedwell #4)(44)

“Lucian’s,” she said, putting a finger to the brooch. “I do not like coming here, but I feel closer to him, knowing this place was so dear to him.”

“You must miss him terribly.” I sipped at my tea and watched a tiny wrinkle etch itself between her brows.

“Not as much in London. Here he is always present because this was his home, but in London we were always changing lodgings, forever buffeted by the winds of chance,” she said. Her voice was light, but there was a strain in her manner and I wondered exactly how happy her marriage had been.

She went on. “My husband was an optimist, almost childlike in his belief that the next great thing was about to happen. He had great power to make others believe it too, or at least he made me believe it,” she added with a gentle smile. She turned and beckoned to the cat, Hecate, who leapt lightly onto her lap and settled herself, regarding me with lamplike eyes. Helen’s hands, beautiful and slim, fell to stroking the animal as it purred.

“There is an otherworldliness to folk from these parts,” she told me in a low voice. “They believe in piskies and faeries and all sorts of things we grow past when we are adults. It is almost as if they never quite leave childhood behind.”

“They are more remote,” I reminded her. “They live on the edge of the world, it must seem to them.”

“Indeed. It worries me sometimes to think that Caspian might have inherited some of that out-of-touch quality. There is a morbidity to the Romillys, a refusal to face the world as it is. It is frightening,” she told me, her hands never pausing in the slow petting of the cat.

“I think all mothers worry for their children.”

She smiled. “No doubt you think me silly. But Caspian is all I have left in the world. I want him to do well and I want him happy.”

“Those things are not mutually exclusive,” I suggested.

“No, but the Romillys seldom make happy marriages.”

“It sounds as if yours was,” I reminded her.

“It was,” she told me firmly. “But mine was the exception, because we did not live here, I think. It was good for Lucian to get away from here. But now I have brought his son back and I wonder if it were a very great mistake.”

“Surely it is good for him to know his family.”

“Yes,” she agreed, but there was a note of hesitation in her voice.

I thought back to the scene between uncle and nephew I had overheard the previous day. “Do you worry about Malcolm’s influence on your son?”

Her eyes widened and her hand stopped, earning her a rebuke from the cat. She resumed petting as she shook her head. “Certainly not. Malcolm is a gentleman. He and Mertensia might be prone to melancholia, but that is the worst one can say about them.”

I hastened to repair the damage. “Forgive me. I heard that Malcolm was intemperate once at school and laid violent hands upon another boy.”

“Oh, that,” she said with a short laugh. “The boy he choked was a nasty little brute. He was playing the bully to one of the younger boys and Malcolm wouldn’t stand for it. He threw himself at the larger fellow and wouldn’t be shaken off. The headmaster insisted upon his expulsion for it, but he came home a hero.”

“You’re quite certain of the circumstances?”

“Of course! Lucian saw it all. They had been sent to school together and the headmaster expelled them both at the same time. He used to tell that story whenever Malcolm’s name was mentioned, he was so proud of his elder brother for holding his own with a boy twice his size.”

I fell silent, wondering why Tiberius had not seen fit to share the mitigating details of the story. Did he know them? Or had Helen invented them?

She went on. “No, my fears with regard to Malcolm have nothing to do with his temper. They are rather to do with his judgment. I fear this house party will be a calamity.”

“What do you think he means to achieve?”

She shrugged one elegant shoulder. “Exactly what he says. To discover once and for all what happened to Rosamund. I only hope he can live with whatever he finds.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

Helen shook her head. “I do not know. I cannot believe Rosamund would have run away. It would have been so out of character.”

“Did you like her?” I asked on impulse.

She gave me a level look. “You are forthright, Miss Speedwell. One is not supposed to ask such things.”

“That means ‘no,’” I replied.

Her mouth curved into a smile. “Very well. I did not. She was very pretty, arrestingly so. But there was something hard about her, I thought. Watchful. It was as though she were always assessing, calculating, waiting to discover what part she should put on to play a role.”

“What role?”

She spread her ringed hands. “Mistress of this castle. She was a governess, Miss Speedwell. She had been trained to serve, to fit in, to be unobtrusive. But something drove her, some determination to better her station. I did not fault her for it, mind you. Women in this world have to compete and there is only so much to go around. If she managed to stake her claim here and made good, I was prepared to accept her as Malcolm’s wife.”

“Your attitude is a very modern one,” I told her.

“I am, unlike the Romillys, a realist. I know too well what the world is like,” she reminded me. “Hence my advice to you yesterday about securing the viscount while you have him. Although I think your inclinations lie elsewhere,” she added with a flick of her gaze towards where Stoker stood at the fireplace, quietly making his way through a plate of cream buns.