Wiliam Monk 01 - The Face of a Stranger

that of his friends, was lost. He could not bear the shame of it, and he took his own life. My mother died of grief a short while later."
    "I am truly sorry for your parents' death," Lovel interrupted, looking first at Fabia, then at Hester again. "But how can all this have anything to do with Joscelin's murder? It seems an ordinary enough matter—an honorable man making a simple compensation to clear his dead son's debt to a brother officer.''
    Hester's voice shook and at last her control seemed in danger of breaking.
    "There was no watch. Joscelin never knew George— any more than he knew a dozen others whose names he picked from the casualty lists, or whom he watched die in Scutari—I saw him do it—only then I didn't know why."
    Fabia was white-lipped. "That is a most scandalous lie—and beneath contempt. If you were a man I should have you horsewhipped."
    "Mother!" Lovel protested, but she ignored him.
    “Joscelin was a beautiful man—brave and talented and full of charm and wit," she plunged on, her voice thick with emotion, the joy of the past, and the anguish. "Everyone
    loved him—except those few who were eaten with envy." Her eyes darted at Menard with something close to hatred. “Little men who couldn't bear to see anyone succeed beyond their own petty efforts." Her mouth trembled. "Lovel, because Rosamond loved Joscelin; he could make her laugh— and dream." Her voice hardened. "And Menard, who couldn't live with the fact that I loved Joscelin more than I loved anyone else in the world, and I always did."
    She shuddered and her body seemed to shrink into itself as if withdrawing from something vile. "Now this woman has come here with her warped and fabricated story, and you stand there and listen to it. If you were men worthy of the name, you would throw her out and damn it for the slander it is. But it seems I must do it myself. No one has any sense of the family honor but me." She put her hands on the arm of her chair as if to rise to her feet.
    "You'll have no one thrown out until I say so," Lovel said with a tight, calm voice, suddenly cutting like steel across her emotion. "It is not you who have defended the family honor; all you've defended is Joscelin—whether he deserved it or not. It was Menard who paid his debts and cleaned up the trail of cheating and welching he left behind—"
    "Nonsense. Whose word do you have for that? Men-ard's?" She spat the name. "He is calling Joscelin a cheat, no one else. And he wouldn't dare, if Joscelin were alive. He only has the courage to do it now because he thinks you will back him, and there is no one here to call him the pathetic, treacherous liar he is."
    Menard stood motionless, the final blow visible in the agony of his face. She had hurt him, and he had defended Joscelin for her sake for the last time.
    Callandra stood up.
    "You are wrong, Fabia, as you have been wrong all the time. Miss Latterly here, for one, will testify that Joscelin was a cheat who made money deceiving the bereaved who were too hurt and bewildered to see him for what he was. Menard was always a better man, but you were too fond of flattery to see it. Perhaps you were the one Joscelin
    deceived most of all—first, last and always.'' She did not flinch now, even from Fabia's stricken face as she caught sight at last of a fearful truth. "But you wanted to be deceived. He told you what you wished to hear; he told you you were beautiful, charming, gay—all the things a man loves in a woman. He learned his art in your gullibility, your willingness to be entertained, to laugh and to be the center of all the life and love in Shelburne. He said all that not because he thought for a moment it was true, but because he knew you would love him for saying it— and you did, blindly and indiscriminately, to the exclusion of everyone else. That is your tragedy, as well as his."
    Fabia seemed to wither as they watched her.
    "You never liked Joscelin," she said in a last, frantic attempt to defend her world, her dreams, all the past that was golden and lovely to her, everything that gave her meaning as it crumbled in front of her—not only what Joscelin had been, but what she herself had been. "You are a wicked woman."
    "No, Fabia," Callandra replied. "I am a very sad one." She turned to Hester. "I assume it is not your brother who killed Joscelin, or you would not have come here to tell us this way. We would have believed the police, and the details would not have been necessary.''