misty mountains of northern Wales.
They were referred to as morning calls, that endless round of formal visits that took place daily amongst the members of Society in residence in London. But the truth was that no gentleman or lady with any pretensions to breeding would dream of appearing on the doorstep of any but his or her most intimate of friends before three o’clock.
And so Sebastian spent the next several hours in Jackson’s saloon, working the soreness out of his muscles. It wasn’t until half past three that he arrived at the home of Guinevere’s sister, Morgana, Lady Quinlan. After the thinly veiled hostility of their encounter at the balloon ascension, he half expected to be told she was not at home. Instead, he was shown upstairs to the drawing room, where he found Lady Quinlan in conversation with another caller, a young woman introduced to him as Lady Portland, wife to the Home Secretary and half sister to Guinevere’s childhood love, the Chevalier de Varden.
She had much the look of her mother, Isolde, being incredibly small and fine-boned. Only her hair was different, an ashen blond rather than a fiery auburn. She was also very young, no more than twenty at the most. As a child of Lady Audley’s second marriage, she was younger than Varden, younger even than Guinevere.
“Lord Devlin,” said Claire Portland, offering her hand and looking up at him with that intense interest used to flirtatious effect by so many of her sex. “I’ve been hearing a great deal to your credit.”
The hand in his was a dainty, frail thing, and he found himself thinking that Claire Portland, like her mother, was far too tiny to have been the owner of the green satin gown that had been used as Guinevere’s death shroud.
“Portland tells me you’ve agreed to help discover the truth about what happened to poor Guinevere,” Claire was saying. “How gallant of you.”
Sebastian adjusted the tails of his coat and sat on a nearby sofa. “I don’t recall,” he said to Lady Portland. “Were you present at the Prince’s musical evening last Wednesday?”
She gave a little shudder. “Thank goodness, no. I had the headache and decided to stay in my room.”
“But you were in Brighton.”
“Oh yes.” She leaned forward as if confiding a secret. “Personally, I find the place rather tedious. But now that Prinny has been named Regent, I fear we shall all be doomed to follow him down there every summer.”
Leaning back again, she fixed him with an intense gaze and said, “Is it true what Portland says, that the people on the streets actually believe the Prince killed poor Guin?”
Sebastian glanced at Morgana, who sat quietly beside the empty hearth. “It’s been my experience that most people tend to believe what they are led to believe,” he said.
Lady Quinlan’s features remained inscrutable, while Claire Portland tipped her head sideways, her expression quizzical, as if she were not quite sure how to take that. Looking into her clear, cornflower blue eyes, Sebastian found himself wondering just how much Lord Portland confided in his pretty young wife. She projected an image of innocence and gaiety, of disingenuous superficiality and the mindless helplessness most men found appealing. But Sebastian knew it was an impression deliberately created by many of her sisters, a consciously deceptive facade that often hid a sharp and calculating mind. Claire Portland was, after all, Lady Audley’s daughter. And Lady Audley was neither mindless nor helpless.
Lord Portland’s pretty young wife stayed chatting a few minutes more, then very correctly rose as required by custom to take her leave. Yet as she made her adieus with sweet effusiveness, Sebastian caught the furtive glance she shared with their hostess. It was a look that spoke of an intention to follow up Sebastian’s visit with a private conference, and hinted at the existence of an old, close friendship. A friendship he wouldn’t have expected between the plain, intensely serious Morgana and this flirtatious woman who was at least as young, if not younger than, the murdered sister with whom Morgana claimed to have had so little in common.
“Why are you doing this?” Morgana asked, fixing Sebastian with a thoughtful stare as soon as the footman had shown her other guest out. “It’s not for love of the Prince Regent, whatever Claire might think.”
Sebastian raised his eyebrows in a simulation of surprise. “Does Lady Portland indeed think that?”
An expression he couldn’t quite decipher flitted across his hostess’s features. She leaned back in her chair, one hand smoothing her gown across her lap. “You came, obviously, to ask me something. What is it?”
It was no easy thing, asking a lady for the name of her sister’s lover. Sebastian tried an oblique approach. “Was your sister happy, do you think, in her marriage?”
A knowing gleam shone in her eyes. “You’re being discreet, aren’t you? What you really mean to ask is, Did Guinevere have a lover and do I know his name? The answer to the first question is, Possibly. To the second question I’m afraid I must answer, No. I don’t know his name. It’s not the sort of thing she would confide in me. As I told you, Guinevere and I were not close.”
“Yet you knew of her childhood attachment to Varden.”
“That was hardly a secret. Presumably even Guinevere would be prudent if she were cuckolding a husband.”
“Whom might she have confided in? Did she have a close friend?”
“Not that I know of. She was always something of a loner, Guinevere.”
To his annoyance, he heard the distant rap of the front knocker, heralding the arrival of yet another round of guests come to offer their condolences to Lady Quinlan on the death of her sister. Sebastian said, “Your sister had a necklace, a necklace with a silver triskelion superimposed on a bluestone disk. Do you know anything about it? It’s an ancient piece, from well before the seventeenth century.”
Lady Quinlan shook her head, her expression blank. Either she knew nothing of the necklace, or she was even better at hiding her thoughts and feelings than he would expect. “No. As a child she had a pearl necklace and one or two small pins that once belonged to her mother, but nothing else I ever knew of. You say it was silver? It seems a strange thing for Anglessey to have given her. Unless, of course, it was a family piece.” A faint smile touched her lips. “Although if that were the case, you wouldn’t be asking me about it, now, would you?”
The new visitors were on the stairs. Sebastian could hear the ponderous tread of a matron, along with the
