had drunk a whole bottle, and he had to grip the arms of the chair so he wouldn’t fall off.
Then the world steadied itself. Cassandra sat staring at nothing, and everything was the same and would never be the same again.
Lord Charles had shot himself. No. Lord Charles was the most cheerful, warmest man he had ever known. He always had a kind word and a smile. He went out of his way to help others, and never let a penny rest in his pocket if someone else needed it more.
“Why?” The word hardly made it out of his choked throat.
“I don’t know. He left no note. After he died, I learned he’d had financial problems, but you gave him enough money to fix that.”
“Yes.”
Money. What in blazes had the money been good for? For too long, Joshua had believed money could solve all problems, but every time he thought he was protected, life went and threw something else at him to prove, yet again, that he was wrong.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he said and immediately wished the question back.
She had written to tell him that her father had died in a riding accident. Invited him to visit the estate that he had inherited.
Instead, he sat alone in Scotland and mourned the best man he had ever known. He had sent money, Newell, and a cat. Bloody hell. He deserved to be pilloried.
“I didn’t tell anyone,” she said.
“Your mother?”
“She doesn’t know. None of them know. You mustn’t tell them.”
She hugged her knees, her cheek laid on them so her hair listed to one side. She looked too young and innocent to carry this awful burden. Naive, he’d called her. Smug, he’d called her.
He moved to sit beside her on the settee. She lowered her legs and let him take her hand.
“What do you mean, none of them know? You carry this alone?”
She played with his fingers and spoke in bursts. “He did it in the second stable, the empty one. There was a storm, so I suppose the thunder masked the noise. A groom found him before dawn and told the housekeeper. She couldn’t wake Mama because…Well. Because. So she woke me instead. I insisted on seeing him. I shouldn’t have. Something tore inside me and I went empty. I sent the groom to fetch Sir Gordon Bell—he’s the magistrate and Papa’s dear friend—and I told him that no one must ever know the truth, and he agreed. If everyone knew, we would have…we would have had to bury him at a crossroads with a stake through his heart. My father. Buried like…I couldn’t let that happen.”
She was tracing the lines on his palm, but he doubted she saw a thing. He did not want to hear this but he had to.
“We paid the coroner five hundred pounds so there’d be no public inquest. That is, you paid him five hundred pounds.” She sounded almost jolly. And he had accused her of pasting a smug smile over her emotions. Bloody hell. “The doctor refused payment, but you bought him a new carriage and horses anyway. You bought the groom a small cottage near Margate, and he moved away and married his sweetheart. The housekeeper Mrs. Greenway didn’t want anything either, but you paid for her two nephews to go to Shrewsbury Grammar School. They’re doing well. You are generous in your bribes.”
“And your family?”
She had been twenty when she did all this. It had been a month after they married, and he couldn’t even remember her face. Where in blazes was her mother?
“They don’t need to know. By the time they woke up, it was all arranged. They had moved Papa, and Mrs. Greenway and the doctor washed him, and the doctor said his face was smashed in the fall so they had to keep the coffin closed.”
A single tear fell onto his hand. She looked up at him. Her eyes were green and wet, the lashes clumped in little spikes.
“He knew, Joshua,” she said. “He worried about dying before I could marry and keep everyone secure, and I laughed at him and said there was no reason he would die. But the whole time he was planning to do it, and that’s why he wanted us to wed. He even transferred his property to you, so the Crown could not seize it. We killed him, you and I. If we never married, he would never have done it, and his demons would have gone away. And now he’s