Page 115 of The Rogue's Last Scandal
She frowned.
“For my dressing room of course. If you can tolerate my snoring we’ll share a bed.”
Something had her preoccupied and frowning, and it had nothing to do with the room arrangements.
“Charley,” she said, between bites of toast, “there is one more thing I want to know.”
His nerves tingled, sounding alarm bells. Her quiet good grace, her delicate tone, her refusal to meet his eyes all signaled something unpleasant. “Only one more?”
“Your mother. What happened?”
An ache started in his head, the familiar sorrow souring his stomach, memories cascading in rapid succession.
Time hadn’t healed, nor had time let him forget.
“Mother died in a carriage accident, along with her maid and her coachman.”
That was the matter-of-fact explanation.
The reality had been something more stark and awful. Her body had shattered on the rocks below the cliff road. Blood smeared the rocks, blood from the horses, the coachman, the maid. Blood from his mother. So much blood. Even now, he had to catch his breath.
“Father doesn’t talk about it.”
She looked at him, eyes wide and solemn. “It wasn’t really an accident?”
He closed his eyes against the memory of his panic. A rider had come to Cransdall Hall with an urgent message for Lord Bakeley. Only, Bakeley had been away, ferrying some horses he’d just purchased, and Perry was off visiting friends.
Father, of course, was out of the country, exactly where, no one knew.
Charley had tossed the message aside and ridden hell bent for the coast, to a cottage he’d never known existed, arriving first, while the locals were still pondering how to remove the shattered bodies.
He set down his fork carefully. “The axle of the carriage was tampered with. Just enough so that the weight of the cases and people on board, and the roughness of the road would break it in two when she reached the narrowest part of the road on the sea cliff. They plunged to the rocks below.”
Or so they had surmised, but it was anyone’s guess if that was the truth. The axle might well have broken in two when the carriage toppled down the cliff side.
She rose and came around the table to him, her soft arms circling his shoulders, her breasts pressing against him.
“You are looking for her killer,” she said.
He sighed. “Yes.”
He’d been looking for years, trying to piece together the truth. Father wouldn’t speak of it, Bakeley had shared the little he knew years ago. Only the Duquesa had provided new facts.
She took in a sharp breath. “Your father was the intended victim maybe. Was he supposed to travel with her?”
“We don’t know.”
“The men after Paulette and Lady Sirena—”
“Were not the right ones. Traitors, they were, though. For every ten soldiers trudging across the Continent and Peninsula, there was one man selling secrets, or shorting supplies, or stealing powder to sell to the enemy.”
Fingers slid up and laced through his hair, easing the ache.
“And how does Lord Kingsley fit in?”
He sighed, bringing his thoughts back into order. “In the Lords, he had an interest in the Admiralty. And there’s his wife. When you trace down her family, you find a network of smugglers that go back three generations.”
Her hand stilled. “Like Gregory Carvelle.”
