Page 140 of The Shadow Key

‘Yes.’

‘You used me.’

‘And you made it so easy,’ Rowena says softly. ‘I knew the minute you looked at me you wouldn’t be able to resist. Few men can. All I had to do was smile prettily and act the innocent, and you fell over yourself to become my protector.’

He did fall over himself, acted like a lovesick fool whenever she was near, all clarity of thought swept away by a pair of exceptional amber eyes.

‘But how?’ His voice cracks. ‘How could you be involved with them?’

‘Easily,’ Rowena says, as if she were proud of it. ‘Julian, you see, made me an irresistible offer.’

Henry swallows, a coil of jealousy tightening in his gut.

‘What were you to him?’

‘A pawn. Just as he was mine.’

Her voice is hard as granite, and as she stares coldly at him something else clicks into place.

‘You destroyed the gatehouse.’

‘I did.’

‘You made the tincture that killed the viscount and Dr Evans.’

‘Right again.’

‘And it was you who drugged Gwen.’

‘Your mother. Yes.’ Again, she presses the knife. Linette gasps as a bead of blood appears at her throat. ‘Not to begin with, of course. For years Julian used Dr Beddoe’s weaker concoctions – ill-made tinctures that Gwen’s body had started to reject. That’s what comes from using a quack, I suppose. No wonder he lost his fancy practice in London. He was found out, eventually, as all his type are in the end, and fled to Criccieth under Sir John’s protection. But three years ago, Julian found me.’

Henry says nothing. Cannot.

‘It was quite by chance, really,’ she continues. ‘Julian had been visiting a local landowner who was to pay a handsome fee for a large shipment of slate. He lived in a manor house on the outskirts of the town I lived in at the time. The man’s wife had fallen ill with a fever and the local physician was held up elsewhere so Julian – to ingratiate himself, I suppose – asked for someone who might help. He was directed to my door. I accompanied him back to the house, sat up all night with the lady, and the next day he escorted me home. But Julian took a fancy to me just as you did, and the money he promised was more than I’d ever see in one year. So for the month he stayed at the manor, I became his mistress.’

All the while Rowena has been speaking Henry has tried to distance himself from the pain he felt at that initial blow, forced himself to focus on the dagger pressed against Linette’s neck. Linette is taller than Rowena by some inches, and though Rowena is holding her at an awkward angle she wields the knife with confidence; there is no way at all Linette could make a move without falling victim to it. But at Rowena’s last words Henry’s concentration is lost, and he looks into her hard face in the growing light.

‘Mistress?’

‘I had no qualms about it, either. By then it was a way of life for me. I’d learnt to suffer the touch of a man since I was a little girl.’

Henry swallows, sick at the thought of it.

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Are you?’ She shrugs. ‘Well, perhaps you are. But what you feel does not matter to me. It never has.’

It is a hurtful boast. Henry stamps it down.

‘How came you to be here?’

Rowena’s eyes narrow. ‘He’s an arrogant man, Julian Tresilian. After he’d had his fill, he liked to tell me of his excursions abroad, his illicit little club. I didn’t listen at first. To me he was just another man eager to hear the sound of his own voice. But then he said a name, a name I had grown to hate with everything in me since the very day I was born.’

‘What name?’

‘Emyr Cadwalladr.’

Linette stiffens in Rowena’s grasp. ‘My grandfather? I don’t understand.’

---