Andrew Lord of Despair(99)

“My wife has been sleeping nearly as much as yours, and when she isn’t sleeping, she’s taking care of her sister or the babies, or answering the servants’ questions so we will continue to have clean laundry and hot meals.”

“Coward.”

“Quaking in my perpetually soggy boots,” Andrew agreed mildly. “I can’t find a good time to approach her.”

“You aren’t even sleeping with her, which is pure foolishness. Women like to cuddle, and you’re the creative sort. You should be able to work with that.”

Andrew fired the ball at Gareth’s chin. “So women like to cuddle, do they? Imagine the opportunities I have missed because this subtlety eluded me.”

“Let me put it this way,” Gareth said, matching the force Andrew had applied to the ball. “If my wife were not bleeding her life away, I’d be sharing that bed with her every spare moment I had, even if it were simply to hold her.”

Andrew caught the ball and held it. “I take your point, Brother, but I have not yet accepted that your wife is bleeding her life away, and neither should you. Though now that I have you alone, I have a question for you.”

“Ask,” Gareth said flatly. “If it’s a question about funeral arrangements, be warned I am up for a bout of mean, bare-knuckle fisticuffs.”

A tempting offer.

“The other night, you told me Julia was not expecting, not my child, not Jeffrey’s—I believe your words were, there was no baby.”

Andrew had repeated those words over and over in his mind, the relief of Gareth’s pronouncement renewed each time.

“Those were my words, and I meant them. When we realized four years ago some aspects of that accident hadn’t been fully resolved, I had Brenner go back and talk to anyone we could find who’d been employed on our Scottish property that summer. Brenner interviewed Mother, Julia’s parents, and as many of the servants as he could locate.”

“That must have been some undertaking.”

“It took weeks, and more than one trip North,” Gareth said, “and he would have interviewed you, but you had already taken yourself off to foreign shores. In the course of his efforts, he came across the woman who had been Julia’s lady’s maid. She had since become a nanny to a cousin of a cousin and so forth, but she recalled the whole summer quite well.”

Why had Andrew never thought to do this? Why had he thought exile on the Continent his only option? “And?”

“Julia’s courses had arrived the morning before we went out on the boat, Andrew. The maid recalled how irritable and difficult her employer had been in the days leading up to the accident, knowing full well Julia had been swiving anything in breeches to try to conceive her much-vaunted child. The maid knew Julia’s patterns, however, and dreaded the tantrum that would ensue when Julia realized she wasn’t pregnant.”

Andrew tossed the ball from one hand to the other. “And that was the more you referred to?”

“Not all of it. Brenner uncovered evidence Julia had paid one of the local sailors to tamper with the rudder.”

“What in the bloody hell could she have been about?” Andrew said, standing and pacing to a dormer window, because tampering with a rudder was tantamount to… murder. Cold-blooded, premeditated, malice aforethought murder.

“Even her maid had no conjecture as to why Julia would have sabotaged a boat she herself was on, but the tampering would not have been evident except in heavy seas. If enough force were applied to the guides and cables, they would have snapped, but not in calm seas. And if you’ll recall, Julia was not sanguine about joining the outing.”

Gareth had carried her up the gangplank bodily, her objections peppering the air.

“Jeffrey loved to take that boat out,” Andrew recalled, facing his brother, “and the seas were calm when we cast off.”

“They were, so perhaps she was merely laying a trap to rid herself of Jeffrey at a later date, should he have been her spouse. She resisted my insistence she join the outing, if you’ll recall. Resisted bitterly. But then, Grandfather also considered himself quite a yachtsman, and Julia’s fatal trap could have been intended for him.”

“But you were prepared to spare Jeffrey the chore of marrying her, and Grandfather was happy to let you do it,” Andrew reminded his brother as he tossed him the ball.

“The offer I made to Julia was to marry her and to live with her in the household of my choosing. She did not accept that offer, because she ‘wanted to raise Jeffrey’s child’ at the family seat, where she knew Jeffrey would be forced to reside at least some of the time. I believed Jeffrey’s protestations regarding the child’s paternity, and would not capitulate to Julia’s conditions. So at the time of her death, she was not, in any sense, my fiancée, despite press and portraits to the contrary.” He punctuated that statement by aiming the ball straight at Andrew’s chest.