An English Lord's Love Affair

Chapter 23.2. Earned Reward

   Edward had stripped down to his boots, shirt, and pantaloons. He had not slept all night. For hours he had been following clues that confirmed what the backward village of Chistlebury had claimed all along.

   Strathmere was haunting his own home. His spirit would not rest until he had confronted his killer.

   Of course what this village of peasants did not know was that Benedic had never been laid to rest. Edward had been unable to attend the funeral because he was allegedly in Wales at the time of the murder. To be present at the burial would have aroused suspicion, and Edward had foolishly assumed that Benedic could not possibly have survived the slashing he had dealt him.

   But the stubborn bastard had refused to die, unlike his two brothers who had very obligingly gone to the grave. Matthew, of an accident in which Edward had played no part. Sebastian, by the assassin's he'd hired in Nepal.

   It was in the midst of war-ravaged Portugal at Corunna that Sebastian, nothing more than an inexperienced messenger boy at the time, had discovered that Edward was trading military secrets to the French.

   Sebastian and his brash young friend Lord Bernard Brumidge had followed Edward one morning to a small village church and caught him in conversation with a Portuguese priest who in secret was working for the French.

   The two men had confronted Edward in private that same day, requesting a clarification of why Edward had met secretly with a priest, and conversed in French.

   Edward confessed that his family had descended from a long line of Roman Catholics. He did not practice his faith in the open; in fact, he had converted to the Church of England to become a soldier, but in a moment of weakness he had thought a few prayers would not hurt. Sebastian should understand; he was, after all, his own nephew, and the family descended from a line of Roman Catholics.

   It was a plausible explanation.

   Sebastian and Bernard had even appeared to accept the story at face value and never questioned him again. A few years later, when Edward angrily resigned his commission in the army to accept a better-paying post with the Honourable East India Company, the adventurous pair asked to again join his regiment.

   Edward had not dreamed that the seemingly boyish young soldiers had been commissioned by British Intelligence to spy on him, to gather information proving he had sold inform6to the French after he had been by-passed for the promotion he believed that he deserved.

   A young inexperienced aristocrat who'd won Millington's favor had gotten the job that Edward coveted. The years he'd worked so diligently for the army counted for nothing.

   Now, ironically, with Benedic's death, Edward had stood poised to receive everything he had earned. A title, land, riches. Damn it to hell, he had killed his own kin for his reward.

   It did not bother him at all that he would kill Benedic for a second time.