Axel (17 page)

Sir Dewey downed the tea in one swallow. “Sitting for hours over cards, or sharing the miles on the Great North Road, surprising topics come under discussion.”

“Please elaborate.”

“Gregory doubted his children were actually his,” Sir Dewey said, pouring himself more tea. “I’m drawing conclusions based on casual comments, the occasional almost-nasty remark offered when a fellow should have gone up to bed an hour ago. Several hours ago.”

Axel knew the type of comment, having made a few himself, and had heard plenty from others. Even some from Matthew, whose gentlemanliness bordered on excessive at times.

“What did Stoneleigh let slip regarding his finances?”

“His finances came from the import business. He left the manor mostly in Abigail’s control. The property would be hers after he died, so her stewardship or lack thereof would be her eventual reward, according to Gregory.”

Sir Dewey paused to swirl his tea, spilling not a drop onto the saucer.

“While in India,” he went on, “Gregory made good connections for a man thinking to turn a profit on imports. After he came home, I maintained those contacts for my remaining years in India. Gregory benefited initially from similar connections made decades ago by the founder of the import business, old Mr. Pennington.”

Well, of course. Abigail had to have met Stoneleigh through family dealings of some sort, about which Axel had failed to ask her in any detail.

“You and Gregory were business partners, Sir Dewey?”

“We were at one time, and when I was associated with the business, we did modestly well, but only that. When I returned to England, my interest in things Asian did not accompany me. I wanted my horses, my acres, peace, and quiet. If I never see another cashmere shawl or hear another peacock again, I will die content.”

Despite Sir Dewey’s professed lack of interest in Asia, the sideboard was teak, the tea service likely Chinese, and if the library wasn’t perfumed with sandalwood, Axel would swear off scones for life.

“You and Gregory argued about the business?”

After a soft tap on the door, the dog ambled back into the room and sat at Sir Dewey’s knee, while the door was drawn closed by a silent, unseen hand.

“We argued bitterly,” Sir Dewey said, tugging gently on the dog’s ear. “I yet felt a certain sympathy for Stoneleigh, so I relinquished my shares, and we got past our commercial differences. The business grew profitable as exotica came more into fashion, and that allowed Gregory to live as he pleased.”

With no real friends? With a wife whom he described as a mentally unstable poor relation while he used her as an unpaid land steward?

“Why would Stoneleigh have chosen a very young woman for his wife, one without dowry, family, or consequence of any kind?” And if the import business was profitable, and some share in it had been part of Abby’s inheritance from old Mr. Pennington, then why would she think the estate bankrupt?

Why—rather—would Stoneleigh have
allowed
her to think that?

“I have wondered about Stoneleigh’s choice of bride myself,” Sir Dewey said. “Particularly given his treatment of Abigail through the years of their marriage. I conclude Gregory was motivated in part by gentlemanly concern for the lady, because her circumstances became difficult when her parents perished in a fire, and in part by his version of loneliness.”

“You’re suggesting the union was a matter of expedience on both sides?” Was the murder another example of expedience?

The hound put his grizzled chin on Sir Dewey’s knee.

“Not purely expedience,” Sir Dewey said, stroking the dog’s head. “Gregory was prey to the impulsiveness that affects some men when they hear a fine brood mare is for sale. He’s coveted her privately and wants to possess her. He starts thinking about which stud to put her to, how soon he can breed her back, what he’ll do with the foal she’s carrying, and before he’s even got up from the table, he’s won half the races at Newmarket—if only he can fetch the mare home.”

Stoneleigh’s inane scheme to landscape his stream came to mind, no estimates, no materials on hand, no schedule, no plan.

“He then pets and fusses her for a while,” Axel said, “until another mare comes up at auction.”

“Like a child with a puppy,” Sir Dewey said, petting his old dog, “or a new toy, and then it’s on to the next.”

“A wife is not a plaything.” Axel had grasped that much even at the age of eighteen.

Sir Dewey tossed the dog a corner of scone and rose. “Abigail is a wealthy, comely young widow. That isn’t all bad.”

For whom?
“I suppose not,” Axel said, rising as well. “You’ve given me much to think about. Please feel free to call on Mrs. Stoneleigh at Candlewick. Her comments regarding you were flattering, and deep mourning without any family about is difficult.”

Sir Dewey turned, hands behind his back. “I hope Abigail does not enjoy your hospitality because she is a suspect? I would take exception to that, Belmont. Either you arrest her on sufficient evidence, or you allow her the liberty due every law-abiding subject of the king.”

Axel chose to be honest—mostly. “Both Shreve and Mrs. Jensen put Mrs. Stoneleigh above stairs when the shot that killed Gregory was fired. I found no sums missing from her account books that suggest she hired murder done by a third party. She had no motive, because she was equally well fixed whether her husband lived or died.”

Other factors Axel kept to himself: Abby had had years to do away with her husband if she’d taken him into violent dislike, and she would not have botched the job if she’d decided to end Stoneleigh’s days. Then too, time would likely have seen to Gregory’s demise if he continued to ride hell-bent after the hounds in all weather.

The lady was truly innocent—thank all the kind powers.

“I am relieved to hear she is free from suspicion,” Sir Dewey said, keeping to his place by the window. “I will call upon her forthwith to express my condolences, if she would not view such a visit as an imposition.”

In the months after Caroline’s death, time had dragged, every day had hurt, and only duty to Axel’s children and hours in the glass houses had kept him sane.

“When one loses a spouse,” he said, “one can struggle, feeling one ought to grieve in some proper sequence, according to protocols concocted by gossip and custom. I’ve told Mrs. Stoneleigh that isn’t so, and she’d welcome a visit from a friend.”

A gentleman’s honor required that Axel proffer this invitation. He was bound for Oxford if all went according to plan, while Abby… Abigail deserved every possible option a widow could have.

Right up to and including a wealthy, handsome English gentleman who had esteemed her greatly for years, been a good neighbor to her, and probably claimed endless stores of scintillating damned repartee.

Though as Axel once against sat himself in a damnably cold saddle, a question plagued him about the handsome Sir Dewey: Why would a man who professed to crave the warmth and comfort of his elegantly appointed hearth upend his routine repeatedly to hare all over the realm during the cold and wet of the shooting seasons, and in less than congenial company, too?

By the time darkness approached, desultory flurries had organized themselves into a snowfall. Abby sat in a rocker by the fire in the library, the candles unlit, her book face-down in her lap. She’d read out in the glass house for hours, an orgy of reading, and she was almost halfway through the tale of Mr. Darcy’s reformation—or Elizabeth’s.

The gloom in the library soothed, a rest for her tired eyes.

She’d done this many times as a girl, read the day away, forgetting time, place, cares, and worries.

Why had she let Gregory take this pleasure from her? She’d done an excellent job with the estate, and that was all he should have asked of her. Her free time should have been her own.

“Are you sleeping in that rocker?” Axel Belmont asked, bringing a branch of candles into the library and setting them on the mantel.

“I am thinking, and hiding from Nicholas.”

“He’s out in the stables, having returned from a sortie to the Weasel,” Mr. Belmont said, seating himself on a hassock. “Has he been insufferable?”

“Trying.” Or amusing. Nothing in Abby wanted to kiss Nicholas Haddonfield, not the way she wanted to kiss Axel Belmont again, and yet Nick appeared available for kissing while Axel Belmont’s attentions were a more complicated prize.

“Will you be offended if I take off my boots?” he asked, tugging hard on one heel. “My feet will take at least until Easter to thaw.”

“You will not offend me. Nicholas came fairly close.” Abby wanted Axel to know this, but also wanted to air her reaction as a measure of comparison. Were widows expected to enjoy mindless flirtation and endless innuendo from available men?

“I apologize on Nick’s behalf,” Axel said, as the second boot came off. “Did you slap him?”

“Slapping him won’t do any good. I think his affliction is grief.”

“My nephew Remington once said something like that,” Axel replied, arranging his boots side by side. “Said the loss of bachelorhood must be grieved by men the way loss of a husband is grieved by women. Did Nick at least apologize?”

Axel was tired, but the firelight also suggested that even as he aged, he’d be an attractive man. His looks were interesting—scholarly Saxon landowner one moment, a Viking impervious to winter the next.

“Nick apologized in his fashion.” By leaving, by going for a ride in the bitter weather, when he’d recently ridden up from Sussex.

“May I offer you a brandy, madam?”

Abby hadn’t wanted to presume by offering her host a drink in his own home, but she also wanted to put off learning what Sir Dewey might have contributed to the murder investigation.

“I am now a widow, in that small subclass of ladies who take spirits on occasion with impunity.”

Axel handed her a drink and took his back to the hassock a few feet away. They sipped in companionable quiet, the tranquil hiss and crackle of the fire the only sound.

“If I ask you a question,” Abigail said, studying the firelight reflected in her brandy, “will you promise not to laugh?”

“I will not laugh.” Instead, he smiled. Mostly with his eyes, mostly at his drink, but Axel Belmont had smiled.

“How did you kiss your wife?”

The smile became sweeter, sadder, more reflective. “Frequently. I like kissing. One tends to forget that, after a few years.”

He was comfortable with this affection for kissing too, which was odd in a man who coveted the celibacy of an Oxford fellow and the exclusive company of thorny horticulture.

“You kissed her frequently, in the manner you kissed me earlier?”

Abby could not be in this library without being aware of what lay on that top shelf behind the desk. Eastern texts, explicit in their illustrations, depicted postures and pleasures that had fascinated her as an adolescent in her parents’ bookshop.

They fascinated her still, as did Axel Belmont’s kisses.

“W
hen Caroline and I married,” Mr. Belmont said, “she probably had more experience kissing than I did.”

He took off his stockings and draped them over the tops of his boots. The familiarity was that of a man comfortable in his own home, one who seldom entertained, and did not regard present company as easily shocked by a man’s informality.

The sight of Axel Belmont’s bare feet and loose cravat was more interesting to Abby than even the impossible poses suggested by his erotic woodcuts. He rose and toed on a pair of slippers warming by the hearth, then returned to his hassock.

“Did that bother you, that your wife had experience?”

“Of course not. I was hardly a duke, that titular succession required excesses of premarital purity in my spouse. Being a university scholar, I wasn’t without experience myself. My sons will tell you I’m a man of shockingly egalitarian principles, despite the results of those sentiments in the hands of the French. No fellow of eighteen wants to face a cringing virgin on his wedding night. But, back to kissing…”

He’d corresponded with the Empress Josephine on the subject of roses. One of her letters—thanking him for his suggestions—was framed over the sideboard. Academics could be ferocious in their own way, truth taking precedence for them over national boundaries and even wars.

And now Axel likely wanted to discuss murder, or roses, while Abby was preoccupied with images of smiling women who could spread their knees impossibly wide.

“Between spouses,” he said, rubbing his right foot with his two hands, “there develops a vocabulary of kisses. I’m sure you and Gregory had yours—the good-morning peck on the cheek, the glad-to-see-you buss upon homecoming, that sort of thing.”

“I’m not asking about those kisses.” Had Caroline ever rubbed his cold, tired feet? “I kissed my wife however the mood dictated.” He paused to sip his brandy. “There were playful kisses, seductive kisses, voracious kisses, thank-you kisses, but I suppose they were all intended to be I-love-you kisses.”

The very last description Abby would have expected from him, and yet, his answer pleased her.

“All of them?”

“I did love Caroline, and my facility with words of that nature was frustratingly limited, at least from her perspective. I don’t think I’m answering your question.” He uncrossed his ankle from his knee and slid his foot back into its velvet slipper. “What did you really want to ask, Abigail?”

“Why did you kiss me?” As Abby had inspected rose after rose—hope after hope, and failure after failure—the whys of Axel Belmont’s kiss had plagued her.

“Ladies first,” he said. “Your motives are of interest to me as well.”

“Why must motive always fascinate you?”

Up went one blond brow.

“Curiosity,” Abby said, with the sense that she was reciting in a tutorial session. “Loneliness.” A loneliness of the heart and body, so deep and abiding, Abby had begun to think it her normal state. Affection had played a role in their kiss, for Axel Belmont had endearing qualities visible mostly in close quarters and at fleeting intervals.