The name almost didn’t make sense. It didn’t compute. Why was Gareth talking about Arabella and Mr. Markham, why was he talking about a childhood growing up with the Whitefields…
“You were the Whitfield bastard,” I breathed, realization clicking into place. “You were Josiah’s son.”
“See, you call me a bastard, but he never made me feel illegitimate,” Gareth said. “I was educated and introduced to the finer members of society and groomed to inherit the estate. He never had a son with his wife, and he always planned to write me into the will…”
“But he didn’t.” Part of me sensed it was dangerous to be so blunt with him—he was clearly mad—but the other part of me was desperate to piece together the reasons I was tied to a chair in an empty suburban mansion. I recalled all of Aunt Esther’s tale. “He died before he could.”
“Because Arabella died. Because Markham killed her.”
“She was sick—”
“She was alive until she married him. She didn’t worsen until after their wedding, until he dragged her all over Europe, and then she died, and left my father unable to cope.”
“And then he died,” I said softly.
“He died and his wife died, and the estate was sold off to the nearest heir, because I wasn’t legally able to inherit. And then I was practically sold off as well. No one wanted me, no one would claim me. My birth mother was dead. Some distant relation of hers, a farmer, took me in and I was forced to finish my childhood among ignorance and poverty.”
He stopped in front of me. “So do you see now? Do you see all he’s taken from me? Not just Violet, but my sister, my parents, my home. All of it obliterated in the face of Julian Markham.”
“So why would you want to work for him? If you hated him so much?”
“Hate is not the right word, Miss Leavold. Not at all. I never had a plan, I never had an elaborate revenge plot that I’d dreamed up like in the novels, but every major event in my life was tied to him, as if he were a port my fate had to return to over and over. I’d found work as a footman in my youth, and when I heard that Julian Markham was looking for a valet…it seemed like destiny. I didn’t know why or what for, but I knew I had to. He didn’t recognize me, of course. I doubt he ever paid much mind to his little bastard brother-in-law, and in case he had, I changed my name.”
“So what…you were biding your time?”
“It’s not like that,” he said, almost impatiently, as if I were being deliberately obtuse. “I wasn’t biding at all. I was working. I just felt like it was right somehow, that I should be close to him. I even thought that one day I would tell him my real name and he’d help me reclaim my place in the world. I never planned on doing anything injurious until…”
Until you fell in love with the same woman. I could see it now, the valet—overeducated and overbred, one small tragedy away from being at the same level in society as Violet and Julian—and then of course, Mr. Markham himself, wealthy and magnetic. Both handsome. Both attractive. Knowing Violet as I did, I wasn’t surprised that she’d been unable to choose. Why not dally with the valet—who after all was born and raised a gentleman—while waiting to be made wife to one of the wealthiest men in the north?
And in true Violet fashion, she hadn’t really loved either of them. It had been another game for her.
A game that had killed her in the end.
“I loved her. And I wanted her to bear my child.” Gareth was truly agitated now, the pain of Violet’s death clearly much more recent and raw than the death of his sister and parents. “And I knew, finally, what I had to do. It all became clear that night he caught us together. He had killed Arabella, and by extension, my parents. He was going to keep Violet and my child away fr
om me…and then what he did to Violet after he found us, the things I heard coming from that room.” He shuddered. “He deserved to die. He deserved it at least three times over, if not four.”
“What did you do?” I whispered.
He met my eyes. “I knew I had to kill him, but I didn’t have the stomach to do it directly. I went out to the stables and cut the cinch of Raven’s saddle.”
I stared back at him, understanding but not fully absorbing what he was saying. I had chosen to trust Mr. Markham. I had believed that he hadn’t cut that saddle, that he wasn’t ultimately responsible for Violet’s death, but after that, I had let the matter lie, shoving the hand that held the knife to the back of my mind. An unsolved mystery.
But here it was: solved, confessed, laid bare.
Gareth had done it.
“You killed Violet.”
“No!” He was beginning to shout now, all pretense at calm abandoned. “He did! He killed her with what he did to her in that room. If he hadn’t tormented her, she would have stayed inside where she belonged and he would have been the one dead in a field. Fuck!” He kicked viciously at a nearby end table, and it fell over with a crash.
I jumped in the chair, adrenaline singing through me, every nerve and muscle alive, every synapse firing. We were nearing the end of the talking time, I saw, moving closer to the reason he had brought me here. I wanted to fight and resist, to somehow bolt for the door, but I knew better. I needed to stall as long as possible, even as I realized there wasn’t much point in it. Mr. Markham was detained by the police, and my aunt would have no reason to worry about me in the care of Mr. Markham’s servant. The thought depressed me, scared me. No one knew where I was. No one knew that I was about to die.
But I had to try.
“I know you didn’t mean to kill her,” I soothed, hoping he couldn’t hear the shaking in my voice. “No one blames you. It was an honest mistake.”
“It was,” he mumbled to himself. “But don’t you see?” His voice grew plaintive, loud, discordant. “He’s taken everything now—including the child I never got to meet. I am going to take something of his.”
