To Seduce a Sinner (Legend of the Four Soldiers #2)(81)

Munroe shrugged. “I’ve been trained to observe. In any case, I do not blame you. Your wife was quite adamant that I should tell you.”

“Thank you.”

“I think we must add loyal and fierce to your wife’s list of virtues. Can’t think how you found her.”

Jasper grunted.

“A rake like you doesn’t deserve her, you know.”

“Just because I don’t deserve her doesn’t mean I won’t fight to keep her.”

Munroe nodded. “Wise of you.”

As one, they began walking again. There was a bit of silence that Jasper found oddly companionable. Munroe had never exactly been a friend—their interests were too different; their personalities tended to clash. But he’d been there. He’d known the men who were now dead, he’d marched through those hellish woods with a rope about his‹ roeir neck, and he’d been the one tortured at the hands of their enemy. There was nothing to explain to him, nothing to hide. He had been there and he knew.

They reached the terrace’s second level, where Munroe stopped and stared at the view. In the distance was a river, to the right a copse. It was beautiful country. The deerhound that had been following them sighed and lay down beside Munroe.

“Was that what you came for?” Munroe asked idly. “To seek my forgiveness?”

“No,” Jasper said, then hesitated, thinking about his confession to Melisande last night. “Well, perhaps. But it isn’t the only reason.”

Munroe looked at him. “Oh?”

So Jasper told him. About Samuel Hartley and the damning letter. About Dick Thornton laughing in Newgate Prison. About Thornton’s accusation that the traitor was one of the men captured. And finally about Lord Hasselthorpe’s near assassination just after Jasper had talked to him.

Munroe listened to the whole story silently and attentively, and at the end, he shook his head and said, “Pure nonsense.”

“You don’t believe that there was a traitor and that we were betrayed?”

“Oh, that I believe readily enough. How else to explain why such a large party of Wyandot Indian warriors were waiting to ambush us on that trail? No, what I don’t believe is that the traitor was one of the men captured. Which of us could do that? Do you think it was me?”

“No,” Jasper said, and it was true. He’d never thought that Munroe was the traitor.

“That leaves you, Horn, and Growe, unless you think one of the dead men did it. Can you imagine any of them, dead or alive, betraying us?”

“No. But dammit.” Jasper tilted his face toward the sun. “Someone betrayed us. Someone told the French and their Indian allies that we would be there.”

“Agreed, but you only have the word of a half-mad murderer that it was one of the captives. Give it up, man. Thornton was toying with you.”

“I can’t give it up,” Jasper said. “Can’t give it up, can’t forget it.”

Munroe sighed. “Look at it from another angle. Why would any of us do such a thing?”

“Betray us all, you mean?”

“Aye, that. There must be a reason. Sympathy for the French cause?”

Jasper shook his head.

“Reynaud St. Aubyn did have a French mother,” Munroe said dispassionately.

“Don’t be an idiot. Reynaud’s dead. He was killed almost as soon as we made that wretched village. Besides, he was a loyal Englishman and the best man I ever knew.”

Munroe held up a hand. “You’re the one pursuing this, not I.”

“Yes, I am and I can think of another reason for betrayal—money.” Jas‹yalhisper turned and looked significantly at the castle. He didn’t truly think Munroe a traitor, but the allegation against Reynaud had irked him.

Munroe followed his gaze and laughed, his voice rusty with disuse. “Think you if I’d sold us all to the French that my castle would be in such disrepair?”

“You might have the money tucked away.”

“What money I have I’ve inherited or made. It’s my own. If someone did it for money, they were probably in debt or richer for it now. How are your finances? You used to like the cards.”

“I told Hartley and I’ll tell you—I paid off the gambling debts I had back then long ago.”

“With what?”

“My inheritance. And my lawyers have the papers to prove it, if you must know.”

Munroe shrugged and began walking again. “Have you looked into Horn’s finances?”

Jasper fell in beside him. “He lives with his mother in a town house.”

“There were rumors that his father had lost money in a stock scheme.”

“Really?” Jasper looked at the other man. “The town house is in Lincoln Inns Field.”

“An expensive part of London for a man with no inheritance.”

“He has the money to tour Italy and Greece,” Jasper mused.

“And France.”

“What?” Jasper stopped.

It took a moment for Munroe to realize he’d paused. He turned from several paces ahead. “Matthew Horn was in Paris this last fall.”

“How can you know this?”

Munroe cocked his head, turning his good eye toward Jasper. “I may be a recluse, but I’m in correspondence with naturalists in England and the Continent. I received a letter from a French botanist this winter. In it he described a dinner party he went to in Paris. It was attended by a young Englishman called Horn who had been in the Colonies. I think this must be our Matthew Horn, don’t you?”