The Shadow at Greystone Chase (An Angela Marchmont Mystery Book 10) Read online

  THERE WAS A chilly dawn mist over the sea, and Angela gazed at it absently, thinking about the business that lay ahead of her. She had been unable to sleep and had risen early to take a walk on deck, her mind occupied with the many things which needed to be done when she arrived in New York, for although her agent had kept her apprised of developments weekly, she was sure there were things he must have forgotten. It would take several days before she was in a position to speak confidently to a buyer about how the company had been doing, and she did not wish to appear at a disadvantage. Other than a certain trepidation at the thought of resuming her life in America (for now Davie was no longer there to cause her misery she felt it was safe to return), she was feeling really rather pleased with herself. She had acquitted herself well in the de Lisle case, and had had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Gilverson’s evident happiness as he thanked her for what she had done. She had met her moral obligations, had owned up to the police, and was no longer in danger of prison. She was leaving a place that no longer held any joy for her, and would before long be able to show her daughter the sights and the attractions of New York. In addition, her friends had thrown a leaving party for her at which they had all behaved quite ridiculously, and she smiled now at the memory, for she had enjoyed it as much as anybody. Yes, she was on the road to recovery now, it was clear enough.

  It was a little colder outside than she liked, however. She took one last breath of the fresh sea air and turned to go back inside to her cabin, and at that moment saw Edgar Valencourt standing a few feet away.

  ‘Hallo, Angela,’ he said.

  She regarded him in silence. Oddly, she felt no surprise. She ought to have known from the start it was all a lie; that he was not dead, for who could kill such a man? He had outwitted the police for more than ten years and had twice eluded the hangman. How was it to be supposed that a mere rabble of thieves could succeed where far better men had failed? And now he had deceived her once again. He had—almost carelessly, as though it were a thing of no moment—stepped forward to save her life, then escaped from prison and faked his own death. For months she had laboured under the almost unbearable weight of the guilt he had caused her, and now here he was, standing before her, again with that careless look about him, as though everything were perfectly normal and the past had never happened. She knew she ought to say something—express surprise at his appearance—thank him graciously for what he had done, but instead she felt a rage welling up within her such as she had never felt before, and which could not be contained. She drew in her breath and glared at him in something like pure fury.

  ‘You—you idiot!’ she hissed, with all the venom she could muster, and then to her utter and everlasting horror burst into tears—not a delicate, ladylike sort of weeping, but a succession of great heaving, gulping sobs that shook her entire body and threatened to overwhelm her, as all the feelings she had so ruthlessly forced into submission since last January rose up together and, smashing down the barricades, made one concerted and successful bid for freedom.

  It would be difficult to say which of them was the more aghast at this. He took a step back in dismay and glanced over the rail as though contemplating a header overboard to take his chances in the Atlantic, while she flapped wildly almost as though she hoped to take flight, then whirled round frantically several times, looking for help. In the end, she might have given it up and made a bolt for it had he not just then summoned up the presence of mind to hand her a handkerchief. She grabbed it thankfully and buried her face in it, and then someone walked past and she was forced to calm herself.

  ‘I’ve had a cold,’ she said at last with dignity. ‘It can take one that way.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said fervently. ‘The same thing happened to me just last week. They threw me out of the library.’

  ‘You’re not dead, then,’ she said after a moment, for want of anything better to say.

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry you’re not dead? Or sorry you pretended you were?’ inquired Angela.

  ‘Whichever you prefer,’ he said carefully. There was a pause, then he said, ‘I know I oughtn’t to have come, but your friend Freddy said he thought you might not absolutely hate me, so I decided it was worth a try.’

  ‘Freddy? Do you mean he knew all along and didn’t tell me?’ said Angela in great indignation.

  ‘I expect he thought it was for the best,’ said Valencourt. ‘And I dare say he was right. But I’ve wanted so much to thank you in person, and I’m afraid I’m selfish enough to do it, whether I ought to or not. Thank you, Angela, from the bottom of my heart. You don’t know what it means to me to have been freed of blame after so long.’

  ‘You’re quite welcome,’ said Angela gruffly. ‘It was the least I could do. I’m sorry about Selina, and your father, and everything.’

  ‘So was I,’ said Valencourt. ‘But one learns over the years not to think too hard about things. I’d quite resigned myself to never convincing anyone of the truth—until you started looking into it. Then I started to hope that you might somehow pull it off.’

  ‘I nearly didn’t,’ said Angela. ‘I was a very reluctant investigator. I’m ashamed to say I was afraid of what I might find out.’

  ‘I can hardly blame you for thinking me guilty,’ he said. ‘Everyone else did, after all. And we were hardly a normal family.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ said Angela. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone quite like your father. Even though he’s dead, one could still feel his presence hanging over everything in the house—including your brother and his wife. Was he really that vindictive?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Valencourt assured her. ‘Always. Of course, these days a doctor would probably look at him and conclude that he was not quite right in the head, but it’s easy to say that with hindsight. At the time we had to live with it.’

  ‘Still, at least you had one person on your side. It was good of your uncle to help you. You ought to think yourself lucky that he had so much patience with you.’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Charles is a good fellow. He didn’t like deceiving you, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t let him tell you I was alive while the murder conviction was still hanging over my head. It would have put you in an impossible position. He agreed with me in the end, but he much prefers an honest life.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Angela. ‘I rather liked him—although he looks so very like you it made me feel quite uncomfortable at times.’

  ‘Yes, he does look like me, doesn’t he?’ said Valencourt thoughtfully. ‘And yet, you know, we’re not actually blood relations at all. He was married to my mother’s sister, and so is really only an uncle by marriage.’

  Angela stared at him, thunder-struck, as this sank in and the final piece of the puzzle at last slid into place. To suggest that there was no blood relationship between Edgar Valencourt and Charles Gilverson was nonsense—why, anybody could see the resemblance! But of course, that explained everything. Roger’s sudden falling-out with Gilverson, his pinning of the murder on Edgar, his cruelty in telling Evelyn that he knew her son to be guilty—all those things now made sense. Evelyn could not possibly have been happy in her marriage to Roger, and nobody could have blamed her if she had turned elsewhere for comfort. When had Roger realized the truth? Angela remembered the cryptic remark he had made to Mrs. Poynter about having been betrayed and made a fool of. What had he said? That something had been there under his nose for years and that he would make them both pay. Angela had assumed that by ‘they’ he meant Valencourt and Selina, but now she understood that he must have been talking about Evelyn and Charles Gilverson. Had someone mentioned to Roger quite casually the resemblance between Edgar and his uncle? Or had Roger noticed it himself? Either way he had arrived at the same conclusion Angela had herself just reached, and in his rage had thrown Gilverson out of the house. How he must have made his wife suffer for it! Then, only a few weeks later, Selina had told him she was expecting Edgar’s child. What a blow
it must have been to him, to discover that the girl with whom he was infatuated had not only rejected him but was about to sully the de Lisle blood-line even further! For a man of his temper it must have been too much for him to take. He had strangled her, and seized the opportunity to revenge himself on all those who had crossed him by his actions thereafter. Edgar would hang, Evelyn would suffer silently, and Charles Gilverson would be forced to watch the consequences of his betrayal from a distance. It all made perfect sense, now.

  As these thoughts passed through her head, Angela suddenly found the situation unaccountably hilarious, and without meaning to she began to giggle. She laughed and laughed until she thought she would never stop, and then somehow she was weeping again, and so it was agreed between them that perhaps she ought to go and lie down for a while until she felt better. They went inside and Valencourt delivered a still-hiccupping Angela into the capable hands of Marthe, who was so astounded to see him that she stuck a needle hard into her thumb.

  ‘I think she’s had a bit of a shock,’ he said, then departed in a hurry, quite possibly in search of a stiff drink, leaving Marthe to suck her bleeding thumb, minister confusedly to Angela and exclaim at length in French, for her English had quite deserted her for the moment.

  Later—much later—they met again on deck, and talked more about the deaths of Davie Marchmont and Selina de Lisle. Angela was now perfectly calm and collected, and if pressed would have denied unto her last breath that she had ever made such an appalling spectacle of herself, although naturally Valencourt was far too tactful to mention it. They talked of the past, but murder is a sickening enough subject and the dead are beyond help, so it was not long before the conversation turned to the future, and to matters of more pressing interest to the two who had been lucky enough to survive. An idle observer might have noticed that the gentleman seemed to be exercising his powers of persuasion on the lady, and that was certainly the case, although the lady was somewhat resistant.

  ‘I’ve told you I won’t take responsibility for you,’ said Angela.

  ‘But you have no choice,’ said Valencourt. ‘You’re already responsible for me. We’re responsible for each other. I saved your life and now you’ve saved mine and we’re bound by that whether you like it or not. Look here: in case it’s not perfectly obvious, I’m in love with you. It’s a damned nuisance—and so are you, quite frankly, given your half-witted taste in husbands. I’d be on a boat to the Argentine now if it weren’t for you, and I’d much rather it hadn’t happened, but there’s not a thing I can do about it so you’ll just have to put up with it.’

  Angela glared.

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Darcy,’ she said with some asperity.

  His mouth twitched.

  ‘Yes, well, perhaps I might have phrased that better,’ he admitted.

  ‘I think you might, just a little, yes,’ she said. ‘And yes, it’s true—you saved my life and I saved yours, but that means we’re square now. The debt is all paid off.’

  ‘Is that the only reason you did it?’ he said. ‘To pay off a debt of obligation?’

  He was looking into her eyes in that way he had. She had always resisted meeting his gaze in the past, but somehow this time she could not. She said, irrelevantly:

  ‘But the police are looking for you.’

  ‘No they’re not,’ he said. ‘Everyone thinks I’m dead. I can start again from the beginning, just as I meant to before all this mess happened.’

  ‘But the more people who know you’re alive the more danger you’ll be in. You oughtn’t to have come,’ said Angela.

  ‘That’s what Charles said. He thought I ought to keep away from you and go to South America. But I decided it was preferable to come after you and risk getting caught than to spend forever alone and wanting you. Besides, what’s life without a little danger? Terribly dull, don’t you think?’

  ‘You’re not going to steal things any more, though?’ said Angela.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s all over and done with now. I won’t deny it was fun, but I shall leave it behind without regret and merely consider it as a sort of reparation for what happened.’

  That brought her up short.

  ‘That’s not how it works, you idiot,’ she said, aghast. ‘Just because you were wrongly accused doesn’t mean you’re allowed to go around taking other people’s necklaces to get your own back.’

  ‘No? Then how does it work?’ he said. ‘I’m afraid my conscience has atrophied a little over the years. I expect it needs some exercise.’

  ‘It certainly sounds like it,’ she said.

  ‘Then will you help me, Angela?’ he said. ‘I’m willing to learn. Please say you will. I promise I’ll do my very best.’

  She wanted to answer, just as she always had, that the workings of his conscience were no business of hers, but she could not, for she was no longer sure it was true. He was right: after what had happened there was a connection between them that would be difficult to break—and did she even want to break it? Her head had always told her that she ought to keep far away from him, but it had no chance of victory against her heart, which would do exactly as it pleased regardless of what was right. Perhaps it was time to give up the struggle and admit that she had no power to stop it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said feebly at last.

  He was still regarding her earnestly.

  ‘I’d like to try and be a better man,’ he said. ‘I can do it without you, but I’d much rather not. All these months I ought to have been thinking of what it might mean not to have the threat of the noose hanging over my head. I ought to have been making plans for a new life abroad, with new people to meet and new things to do. But instead I’ve thought of nothing but you. Every time you came to see Charles I bored him silly afterwards with questions about what you’d said, and how you looked, and all the time I was wondering whether you ever thought about me. Eventually I was forced to the conclusion that you didn’t, and I was quite resigned to letting you go, but then Freddy came and told me he thought you were unhappy. That’s when I determined that I’d try and make you happy again if I possibly could. Will you let me try, darling? We’ve both had a bad time of it, but we can make one another happy if you’ll only say yes—I’m quite certain of it.’

  There are many worse things in life than to receive a declaration of love and a promise to reform from a charming and handsome man, however dubious his past activities, and Edgar Valencourt at his most persuasive was a difficult man to resist. The soft-hearted Angela was not proof against any of it, of course. By now she could not have torn her gaze away even if she had wanted to, and she was trying valiantly to prevent herself from sinking, but to no avail. His eyes held hers and asked the question. Slowly, hesitantly, she nodded, and he smiled, satisfied.

  They stood for a while at the rail, looking out to sea. He took her hand, and she hesitated but did not protest. Then gradually his arms stole around her, and again she did not object, for after many months in which she had struggled with her own unworthiness, it was very pleasant at last to feel that here, at least, was someone who did not disapprove of her—and in fact showed every sign of liking her very much. One thing was still unresolved, however.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said.

  He knew immediately what she meant.

  ‘My darling girl, there’s nothing to forgive,’ he said. ‘I meant you to do it.’

  ‘I know, and I hated you for it,’ said Angela. ‘But not as much as I hated myself for doing it.’

  ‘Don’t feel like that,’ he said. ‘I have everything to thank you for. You’ve returned the favour and more. Please don’t give it another thought.’

  Fine words, but it was not as easy as that. She would never forget what she had done, although she was relieved at his forgiveness. Perhaps one day she would forgive herself too.

  ‘You’re too thin,’ he said, after a while.

  ‘Oh, so I’m a damned nuisance and I’m too thin, am I?’ said Angela, who was having to m
ake the strongest effort not to cling to him for dear life. ‘I wonder you bothered coming at all.’

  ‘I couldn’t resist,’ he said softly, his mouth somewhere near her ear. ‘You know I’d follow you to the ends of the earth, don’t you?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. I’m only going as far as New York.’

  ‘Then that’s where I’ll go too. You won’t get rid of me that easily.’

  ‘So I see,’ she said, trying not to smile. ‘And yet I tried as hard as I could.’

  ‘You wretched woman, I love you so terribly much,’ he said.

  ‘Wretched? There you go again,’ she said. ‘If you can’t be polite then perhaps you ought to stop talking and kiss me instead.’

  ‘What a splendid idea,’ he said.

  After a few minutes the sun came out and everything began to look brighter, although neither of them noticed. Then people began to come out on deck, and they reluctantly pulled apart and went for a walk.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ she said, observing that he had a slight limp. ‘Then you really were shot.’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ he said. ‘It was touch and go for a while, but I seem to be as tough as old boots. Besides, I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction, not after I’d gone to all the trouble of giving back the brooch to its rightful owners.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Angela.

  ‘Don’t be. You ought to be glad, because it made me more determined than ever to give up the old life. I’ve had too many guns pointed at me recently for comfort.’

  ‘I thought it was too much to hope for that you’d had a revelation and suddenly acquired virtue,’ said Angela. ‘Admit it—you’re giving it up because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps it’s just because I’ve found something I want more.’

  She shook her head at him.