A Masquerade in the Moonlight - By Kasey Michaels Page 0,134

look like that. I never, ever want to look like that, or feel the fear Geoffrey felt.

It didn’t begin then, my fear of death. It began with that old crone in Italy, that miserable fortune-teller who laughed and prophesized that I would come to an early end. A messy end.

My fear doubled and redoubled that night, in the moment Geoffrey Balfour died. My dread of dying. Don’t we, all of us, think of death, of our death? Yes. We don’t believe it. Not really. No, we cannot imagine it. But we fear it. I fear it now, but soon, blessedly soon, I will fear it no more.

But I am ahead of myself. The three bunglers showed up then, late, always late, and William bullied them into becoming a part of it. He told us all Geoffrey had been sacrificed to save our group. We believed him. It was, after all, too late for anything else.

We took Geoffrey back to Chertsey, all five of us, and slid a noose around his neck, hanging his lifeless body from the trellis in the gardens. William wouldn’t even allow Stinky to close Geoffrey’s eyes.

Victoria found him the next morning and collapsed. William gave up his plans of treason—did he ever really plan to throw in with the French, or was it all, all of it, just to gain him Victoria?—and we went our own ways. But there is some justice. Victoria was lost to William, for she never fully recovered her strength, although I believe he attempted one last time to propose marriage last year, just days before she died. Now his obsession is Marguerite, and once more he has called us to do treason.

But he won’t win this time either. He won’t have Marguerite. He won’t have anything. I’ll see to that. Once Maxwell has worked his magic, I will have my revenge on William. I confess that sin now, to lump it with the others. Geoffrey deserves at least that—that his Marguerite will be saved from William. For if he ever learned about the American, about the way he tumbled her, he’d kill her, that’s what William would do. I will be doing a good deed, won’t I, saving Balfour’s daughter? I’m not a bad man.

And so I vow, on my most sacred oath, that this is my full confession, given freely, as Maxwell says it must be. I am now released from my old life and ready to enter into the world of the reborn, the world of eternal life, and I will accomplish what William could only dream and scheme of, for nothing will be impossible for me. I will rule fairly—

“The rest is drivel,” Thomas said, throwing the pages on the table and looking at Dooley, who was shaking his head in mingled horror and disbelief.

“Marguerite can’t be allowed to read all of this, read these horrible details of dear Geoffrey’s final agonies,” Marco said, flicking at the pages with the back of his hand. “She’d never be content to turn it over to the authorities and let them punish Laleham and Harewood. Not the Marguerite I know. No, she’ll take up her pistols and go after them herself. She can do it, you understand. I’ve seen her shoot, and she can do it. And then, because her heart is good, she will fall into very little pieces not even you, my new friend, will be able to put together again.”

Thomas picked up the pages and began reading through them again rapidly, trying to think. According to the dates mentioned in Harewood’s confession, Geoffrey Balfour had been murdered when Marguerite had been no more than eleven or twelve. She’d admitted to Thomas she hadn’t known immediately that her father’s death had been a suicide. And no wonder. Who would tell a child her beloved father had hanged himself?

“Oh, sweet Jesus, I ought to be horsewhipped,” he breathed quietly, remembering how harshly he had judged Geoffrey Balfour, and then opened his big mouth and said as much to Marguerite. It was a wonder she hadn’t skewered him on the spot! She had to know some of what Harewood had confessed, some inkling of The Club’s involvement with her father’s death, or she never would have acted. How had she learned any of it? And did it matter? No. It didn’t. It was enough that she knew. But Marco was right—she didn’t know it all. If she did, those five men would already be dead. She didn’t know it all—and she