Anglessey nodded. “He thinks Guin was poisoned.” He brought one hand to his face and rubbed his closed eyes with a spread thumb and forefinger. “The dagger would have been a far kinder death. Quick. Relatively painless. But cyanide? God help me, how she must have suffered. She’d have had time to know she was dying. I can’t imagine what her last thoughts must have been.” His hand fell to his side, his eyes open wide and hurting. “Who did this? Who could have done such a thing to her?”
Sebastian held the old man’s tortured gaze. “Bevan Ellsworth claims the child Lady Anglessey carried was not yours.”
The words were blunt and brutal, but necessary. The Marquis’s head snapped back, his jaw going slack with shock and anger. He tried to take a quick step forward, only to stumble over an uneven tile so that he had to fling out one hand and catch the edge of a nearby iron table for balance. “You dare? You dare say such a thing to me? I’ve called men out for less.”
Sebastian kept his own voice calm. “He’s not the only one saying it. The assumption on the streets is that she was the Regent’s mistress.”
The Marquis’s face had gone white, his thin chest jerking so hard with each breath that for a moment Sebastian was afraid he might have pushed too far. “It’s not true.”
Sebastian met the old man’s furious gaze and held it. “Then help me. I can’t find out what really happened to your wife if I don’t know the truth.”
Anglessey swung away. He suddenly seemed older, shrunken. Picking up a long-spouted watering can, he went to fill it at the pump. Then he simply stood there, his head bowed.
When he finally spoke, his voice sounded tired. Resigned. “It’s no easy thing, facing the final years of your life with the knowledge that everything you’ve dedicated yourself to preserving will be destroyed after your death by another man’s dissipation.”
Sebastian was silent, waiting. After a moment, Anglessey took a deep breath and continued. “Guinevere and I both went into marriage with our eyes wide open. She knew I wanted a young wife to give me an heir, and I knew that her heart already belonged to another.”
“She told you that?”
“Yes. She thought I deserved to know. I respected her for it. It was my hope that we would at least become friends. And in that, I think we succeeded.”
Friends. A lukewarm enough ambition for husband and wife. Yet it was a status achieved by very few married couples of their society.
“My second wife, Charlotte, was never well,” said Anglessey, tightening his grip on the watering can. “For the last fifteen years of her life, I essentially lived the life of a monk. Other men in my position would have taken a mistress, but I never did. Perhaps that was a mistake.”
It was a common maxim that a man lost his ability to bed a woman when he quit bedding women. An old maxim that probably had a fair amount of truth in it, Sebastian decided.
Anglessey went to tip a careful stream of water along the roots of a line of ferns. “I was never able to consummate my marriage with Guinevere.” A faint line of color touched his sharp, high cheekbones and stayed there. “She tried. We both tried very hard. She knew how much it meant to me to have a son. But it eventually became obvious that it wasn’t going to happen.”
He hesitated, then pushed on. “Two years ago, I suggested she take a lover, someone who could father the heir I couldn’t.” He swung his head to look back at Sebastian. “You think it a vile thing, for a man to push his wife into infidelity, to seek to disinherit his own nephew by putting another man’s bastard in his place?”
“I know Bevan Ellsworth,” said Sebastian simply.
“Ah.” Anglessey moved on to a shelf of orchids. “It’s the only time I can remember Guinevere ever being truly angry with me. It was too much to ask of her—too much for any man to ask of his wife. She made me feel as if I’d asked her to prostitute herself, which I suppose in a way is precisely what I had done.
“But then, last winter…’’ His voice trailed away as he gazed out over the lush groupings of exotic ferns and jasmines, gardenias and tender China roses. He tried again. “Last winter, she came to me. She said…”
“She said she would do it?” Sebastian prompted when it became obvious the old man could not go on.
“Yes.” It was little more than a whisper.
Sebastian stood in the center of the conservatory, breathed in the hot, fetid air. From the far corner came the sound of a fountain bubbling into a small pond with flickering goldfish. Beside it, a caged canary filled the morning with a song that should have been cheerful, but instead sounded mournful, despairing.
“The name of her lover. What was it?”
Anglessey emptied his watering can, then simply stood there, staring down at the moist, dark earth before him. “I thought it better never to ask. I didn’t want to know.”
“Could it have been the man she was in love with before you married?”
He was silent for a moment. It was obvious the possibility had occurred to him. “Perhaps. But I honestly don’t know.”
By last winter, Sebastian thought, the Chevalier would have completed his studies at Oxford. Had the two former lovers met again in London and decided to begin a physical relationship? A relationship to which her husband had already consented?
“Do you know where they used to meet?” Sebastian asked.
“No. Of course not.” Anglessey paused. “You think this man—the one Guinevere took as her lover—is the one who killed her?”
“It’s possible. Can you think of any other reason your wife would go to Giltspur Street in Smithfield?”
“Smithfield? Good heavens, no. Why?”
