Page 41 of The Secret Word (Twist Upon a Regency Tale #10)

C lem picked at her breakfast.

“Not hungry, darling?” Chris asked, looking concerned.

“How do I go on?” The words burst from Clem as if breaking through a dam. “How, Chris? He is my father, and he has been doing these terrible things. I never knew. How could I not have known? Such evil! I feel soiled, Chris. Guilty, too. I should have known somehow. I should have stopped him.”

Chris scooted around the corner of the table to take her in his arms, and she wept noisily on his shoulder. “Of course, you could not have known. He was at great pains to keep it secret, my love. And you are neither guilty nor soiled. We are not our fathers, and thank goodness for that.”

“That is very logical,” Clem acknowledged. “But Chris, I don’t feel logical.”

“I know. I know. But we shall get through this.”

Disgust still sat in her belly, cold and heavy, but she did feel a little better.

Dread was there, too, though. “Chris, he will find a way to get back at us. More than cutting us off, I mean. He hates us now. We have beaten him, at least for the moment, so he will have to do something to hurt us. That is how he is.”

Chris took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “He is an evil man, Clem. Worse than my grandfather, and that takes some doing. We shall stay alert, I promise you.”

They were interrupted by a footman. “Sir, there is a constable at the door.”

“Give me a couple of minutes and then show him in,” Chris said. He dipped one of the napkins in a finger bowl and wiped Clem’s eyes. “Do you want to stay and hear him?”

Of course she did. “It will be Father,” she said. “I know it.”

It was, but not in the way Clem expected.

The constable was uneasy about her being present, and she soon found out why he would have preferred to have spoken with her husband on his own.

“I regret to inform you, Mrs. Satterthwaite, that your father, Mr. Bertram Wright, has been found dead in his offices. Shot, ma’am, perhaps by an intruder. ”

Perhaps he expected her to fall into strong hysterics. Instead, she could only sit there, frozen, thinking, Will is safe. Chris is safe. My family is safe .

“Mrs. Satterthwaite has had a shock,” Chris was saying to the constable.

“Sir,” the constable said, obviously embarrassed, “I understand you have had a disagreement with your father-in-law. I need to ask you, sir, where were you last night?”

Trust Father to attack them even in dying!

But Chris was explaining to the constable that he had won the disagreement with Father.

“Now if I had been shot last night, you might have looked at Wright for it. But—you can ask the magistrate—I won my case, so Wright was not a threat to me.” He went on to assure the constable that he had been at home all evening and all night, and that the servants could attest to that.

He handed the constable over to the footman.

“Take him through to the servants’ hall and tell everyone to answer any questions he might have,” he said.

When the constable was gone, Clem told Chris, “I am glad that he is dead. Does that make me a terrible person? But I am. I know you told him he could have supervised visits to Will, but I never wanted him to see our little boy again, and now he won’t.”

“I feel the same way,” Chris said. “But best if we keep that between ourselves, my love.”

The constable must have been satisfied with what he heard from the servants, for he apologized for disturbing the household and took himself off.

Billy O’Hara was their next visitor. “Have you heard?” he wanted to know.

“Wright is dead,” Chris said, and Billy nodded.

“Shot,” he said.

“The constable who called thought Chris might have done it,” Clem blurted, looking at Billy in suspicion.

“I think I convinced him I was here all night,” Chris said.

Billy smiled at Clem. “I didn’t do it either, Mrs. Satterthwaite. In case you were wondering. I think it was a good idea, though. Whoever did crash that monster did everyone a favor.”

“Not if the magistrates arrest Chris for it,” Clem retorted.

“As to that, I have a suggestion. Chris, talk to the magistrate in charge. Show him your evidence against Wright. If ever there was a reason for a man to kill himself, Wright’s secret was it.”

“Father would never have killed himself,” Clem objected.

“The magistrate doesn’t know that,” replied Billy.

Which was true enough, and, indeed, whether the magistrate believed that Father had committed suicide or not, after seeing Chris’s evidence, he dismissed the case, writing on the death certificate, “accident with a gun,” which Richard Anderson said was magistrate-speak for suicide.

Clem was glad that women were not encouraged to attend funerals in order to protect their “delicate sensibilities”.

Chris went, and said that the congregation was very sparse, with only Morton, Father’s business rival, the lawyer, Harcourt, and a couple of people from Father’s office.

“Harcourt wanted to talk to us about the will,” Chris told her.

“He is downstairs. Would you like to hear what he has to say?”

Father had not had time to change his will, which meant everything went to his grandson, with Chris as his trustee.

“I suppose this means we still have to take that trip to Yorkshire, my love,” Chris said.

“It will be quite nice to see Yorkshire again,” Clem told him. “Anyway, as long as we are together, dearest beloved, it doesn’t matter where we go.”

Chris gave her a deep and satisfying kiss. “Together,” he agreed. “Always.”