“Then why pay him?”
“I was weak.” He glared up from under his brows. “I suppose now you’ll call down the authorities on me, for the death of that—that rapacious bastard.”
Quite unexpectedly, Alec felt a moment of pity for the old man. Lacey had ruined his own life with hatred and anger and now guilt. Lacey, of all people, didn’t have it in him to stand up and condemn his own son to spare another. “No,” he said quietly. “Not at the moment.” There was little proof of the deed. The diary would incriminate George Turner more than it would Lacey; Alec doubted Turner had even used his name outright. “But you should have this.” He drew Will’s letter from his pocket and held it out.
The older man glared at it, then started as he recognized the handwriting. “Where did that come from?” His voice shook as he reached out to touch the letter with his fingertip, then took it from Alec’s hand.
“He asked me to deliver it, in the event of his death. It was sent home with my personal effects after Waterloo.”
He waited for the meaning to sink in. After a moment Lacey paled and looked up. “Then—no one has seen—”
“I read it.” But Lacey knew. Will could have been exposed as a traitor at any time, by his own hand. Perhaps that was as Will intended it. Alec felt a fierce sorrow clutch at him, that Will had chosen to make his confession and ride to his death. With this man for his father, he must have seen no other honorable choice. He had done his best to atone for his sin, by asking Alec to look after his wife and child, by laying out his confession to the one man who would never have believed it otherwise, and by sacrificing himself in a last dying moment of patriotism and honor. Only through chance had the letter gone missing. George Turner had seized that chance, casting the blame from Will onto Alec, and in doing so sealed Angus Lacey’s loss in a tomb of agonizing uncertainty. If Lacey had had this letter, he might have refused Turner’s demands. Alec might have proven his innocence years ago, or even not been accused at all. Cressida might have never lived in Marston at all, nor asked Hastings for his aid, and then he would have never met her.
For the first time, Alec didn’t know which course he would have preferred, had he been offered the choice. Innocence, without Cressida…or five years of guilt, but with Cressida at the end? There was no question that he had found more peace and happiness with her than he’d ever expected in his life. Knowing what he had done, even what he had been accused of doing, she accepted him and trusted him and gave him her heart. Alec had never met another woman like her, and knew he could appreciate the depth of her faith and love as he could never have done before Waterloo.
“What happened to Turner?” he asked again. Cressida and her family deserved to know his fate, whatever the man had done in his life.
“He came here late at night,” murmured Lacey. He was still staring hollow-eyed at the letter in his hands. “Some months ago. He wanted money—always money. He set up house in Marston to torment me, to flaunt his presence in my face at every opportunity. There were papers, he said, in William’s hand. As this letter…” He turned it over, handling it as gingerly as if it were spun of glass. “Just as this letter. Papers he would sell me, one page at a time, and I paid him to conceal my son’s weakness.” His voice broke on the last word. “I sent Morris to try to find them, but he never could.”
Alec remembered the man sneaking around Cressida’s stable on that long-ago day when he had first gone to see the Turners, and another small puzzle piece fell into place. Of course; it had been Morris.
“And then that villain came and said he would sell me the last of them, save one,” Lacey went on, his voice heating with fury again. “He said he intended to move to London, and I suppose defraud other men more prosperously situated. If he had offered every page I would have paid him and been done with it, burned it all and gone to my grave with the shame. That last page, though, he meant to hold forever, no doubt to bleed me even more when he had run through the money. He was a leech, a conniving, amoral excuse for a man, and I am not sorry he’s dead, no matter what it costs me.”
“What did you do to him?”
“Morris took him away,” Lacey muttered. “I don’t know where, nor do I care.” With trembling hands he unfolded the letter and began to read.
Alec watched the lines of his face grow deeper, and felt Lacey’s pain almost as his own. Will’s last letter was damning, in detail and in scope: how he had married in a reckless burst of passion and love, how devastating his father’s disapproval had been, how his finances had grown desperate. How he had been seduced into giving information to the French, and how he believed he had gotten away with it when Bonaparte was sent into exile the first time, only to realize he had compromised himself too far when the Emperor returned and marched on Belgium. And most tragic of all, his belief that the only honorable atonement for him was death on the field of battle, repaying the blood he had cost England with his own. Alec felt the force of his own grief for Will, and at the same time a
