A Masquerade in the Moonlight - By Kasey Michaels Page 0,95

feeling very protective of her mother, rose from the bench she had been resting on and began walking toward the sound of Victoria’s voice, wishing she had paid more attention to the construction of the high, thickly hedged maze, for the first turn she took found her moving farther from the voices, not nearer.

She quickly retraced her steps, then skidded to a halt when she heard the sound of a slap ringing in the air, followed quickly by her mother’s anguished scream. It was one thing to be tenacious, but quite another to go beyond the boundaries of polite behavior. The boor must be trying to kiss her.

Holding her skirts high as she ran, Marguerite tore down the twisting paths to the rescue, loudly calling for her mother as a way to warn the woman’s admirer away, her heart pounding in fear liberally mixed with righteous anger as the lovely day descended into a living nightmare.

Moments later, years later, whole centuries after that single scream, Marguerite discovered her mother’s slim form lying like a wilted flower in the center of one of the paths and raced to her side, lifting her mother’s head against her knees.

Victoria looked up at her, her eyes clouded and rather unfocused, and pleaded, “He said... he told me... but it was suicide, wasn’t it? He hanged himself. Dear God, he hanged himself! I saw him! It was suicide! Everyone knows. How can I stand it? How can I live?”

Those were the last words Victoria Balfour ever uttered, for she had fainted then, and died two days later, Sir Gilbert, Marguerite, and Lord Laleham at her bedside, all of them grieving over their sad loss.

“But I lost twice, didn’t I, Papa?” Marguerite said now, looking up at her father’s portrait, seeing him smile down at her, the perpetual mischief in his eyes captured forever by the artist’s brush even though the man himself lay in the mausoleum at Chertsey, beside her mother. “I lost my mother, and I lost my innocence. Suicide. I understand why they never told me, for I was only a child. But how could you have done such a thing? You didn’t even say good-bye. I lost you once years ago, and yet again last year, along with Mama. And never did I hear a good-bye.”

Her eyes strayed to Geoffrey Balfour’s diary and she remembered the final, undated entry, the one in which he had mentioned The Club and his fears for his meeting with those members. The same men whose initials he had listed in another part of the diary along with short descriptions that had helped her to identify them—the same men who had been in attendance that fatal day at Laleham.

She walked across the room to stand directly beneath the life-size painting. “You taught me so many things, Papa, about the stars and the moon and the foibles of our fellowman. But you never taught me how to lose. Maybe you never learned yourself. Perhaps that explains why you couldn’t face those people who invested with you—why you couldn’t go along with whatever treason The Club asked of you and still face me, your kitten.”

She shivered, remembering the way Donovan’s voice had sounded as he had used that endearment just last night, afterwards. Why had she reacted so badly, so violently? It was a word, just another word. Words. Like kitten. Like good-bye.

“Yes, Papa,” she continued, forcing herself to push her memories of the night before into the farthest recesses of her tortured brain. “Your kitten, your adoring, all-believing daughter. So you left me. You left me here by myself, to take care of Mama, to grow up alone and all unknowing. But now Mama’s gone too, and one of those damnable men of The Club had killed her as surely as if he’d put a knife through her heart. You took the coward’s way out, leaving those men here to hurt her with their unkind words about your suicide, and me here to deal with it all. Love! It doesn’t exist, not when put to the test.”

She turned away from the painting, the heavy white silk of her gown whispering as, after taking only three steps, she sank to her knees on the carpet, wrapped her arms about her waist, and began to rock, reluctantly reliving the hours she had spent with Donovan.

Donovan said he loved her. Donovan would say anything to get what he wanted. He was an Irishman, for all his talk of America, and he