parading so proudly before its stable. She wondered if the theatre programme and the handkerchief were still locked in the safe behind, or if he had discarded them when he discovered that she had betrayed him. She turned her gaze away to the bookcase, unwilling to dwell on that thought, or the painting that had provoked it.
What had he thought when he learned that Rotherham was her father? Only in the light of Marianne’s revelation did Venetia appreciate just how difficult that must have been for Linwood. She thought of the cold gaunt man who had been Rotherham and of her mother who had loved him. And she felt the usual shame and anger. He really had been a monster. She pushed the memories away and saw the books that lined the shelves, all the same books that had been there that night. The books on stargazing, the one she knew held the diagram of Pegasus sitting snug beside the book on the daily lives of wolves in Britain. And on the shelf below—a second copy of the very same book on wolves in Britain.
Dread tiptoed down her spine, dipping a hollow in her stomach and turning her blood cold. She wondered why she had not noticed it before. Wolf. The word seemed to leap out from the title, making her think of the silver wolf’s-head, with its two emerald eyes, at the top of her husband’s walking cane.
She took the copy from the lower shelf and laid it on top of the desk. There was a horrible gaping feeling inside of her. She did not want to look inside the book, but she knew that she must. Her fingers were trembling as they touched the dark blue leather cover and opened it.
Her heart did not beat. Life ceased to be. Everything she had believed crumbled to dust. There was no printed frontispiece, no monogram upon the interior of the cover that claimed the book as Rotherham’s or Linwood’s, only a thin neat handwriting that she recognised too well...beneath each dated entry of a journal.
It felt as if she had just been punched in the stomach. She could do nothing more than stare, reeling by the shock of it. She could not move, just stood frozen in disbelief, while all the world outside moved on around her. It could not be true. But she knew very well that it was.
‘Oh, God, help me!’ she whispered. ‘Oh, God!’ She clutched her arm around her stomach while the nausea roiled and expanded. She felt sick, sicker than she had ever done in her life. ‘Please no!’ she prayed, but nothing changed the fact that it was Rotherham’s journal lying there upon the desk.
Her lungs felt small and hard, and there was a terrible cold tightness in her chest as if a band of iron had been fastened around it and was tightening more second by second. And where her heart had been was a pain of such searing intensity that it made her gasp aloud.
She did not know how she made it back round to perch upon the desk chair. She sat in the gathering darkness, numb with shock and pain. For she knew there was only one place from which Linwood could have taken the journal. And she knew what that meant—Robert had been right.
She felt like her heart had been gouged from her chest and she did not really understand why, because she could understand why Linwood had done it, she could even forgive him...for the murder. What she did not think she could forgive him was the betrayal. It was the betrayal that hurt so much. Her own stupid naivety, defiant and ignorant in the face of everyone else’s assertions. And she cringed when she thought of what she had said to his father. At her own gullible determination to defend him.
Linwood had not lied to her. He had never claimed to be innocent. So why did she feel this way, like her every belief of the man that she had married, the man that she loved, had been turned to dust and blown away in the wind? She had thought the game of deception through truth over, that there was only him and her. But Linwood had been playing all along, even after he had won.
She could not cry a single tear. Inside her was a terrible blackness and an anger that seethed and a bleakness that stretched eternal. She could do nothing other than sit there and