Lyall stiffened.
Alexia answered her own question. “No, of course he doesn’t know. He needs to trust you. He needs you to be his reliable second just as much as you need him as leader. Telling him would defeat the very action you took; it would disturb the cohesion of your pack.”
Professor Lyall turned to face her. His hazel eyes were tired, for all they were set in that eternally young face. There was no pleading in them. “Are you going to tell him?”
“That you were a double agent? That you destroyed his relationship with his old pack, with his best friend, with his homeland, to steal him for Woolsey? I don’t know.” Alexia put a hand to her stomach, suddenly exhausted by the events of the past week. “It would destroy him, I think. Treachery from his Beta, his lynchpin. A second time.”
She paused, looking him full in the face. “But to keep this information from Conall, to share in your deception? You must know that this puts me in an untenable position as his wife.”
Professor Lyall avoided her direct gaze, wincing slightly. “I had no choice. You must see that? Lord Maccon was the only werewolf in Britain capable of taking on Lord Woolsey and winning. When Alphas go bad, my lady, it is sickening. All that concentrated attention to pack cohesion and all that protective energy turns rotten—no one is safe. As Beta, I could shield the others but only for so long. Eventually, I knew his psychosis would leak out, encompassing them as well. Such a thing can drive an entire pack to madness. We don’t talk of it. The howlers don’t sing of it. But it occurs. I am not trying to excuse myself, you understand, simply explain.”
Alexia was still stuck on the horror of having such knowledge when her husband did not. “Who else knows? Who else knew?”
A knock sounded and then immediately the door crashed open.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, doesn’t anyone wait to be bidden entrance anymore?” cried Alexia in vexation, whirling to face the intruder, parasol quite definitely at the ready. “I said no one was to disturb us!”
It was Major Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings.
“And what are you doing here?” Lady Maccon’s tone was far from welcoming, but her parasol relaxed into a safer position.
“Biffy is missing!”
“Yes, yes, you’re late. He turned up next door, got into a tussle with Lord Akeldama, and now Conall has him down in the wine cellar.”
The Gamma paused. “You have a crazed werewolf in your wine cellar?”
“You can think of a better place to stash him?”
“What about the wine?”
Lady Maccon abruptly lost interest in dealing with her husband’s Gamma. She turned back to Professor Lyall, who was looking cowed. “Does he know?”
“Me? Know what?” Channing’s beautiful ice-blue eyes were the picture of innocence. But his eyelids flickered as he took in Alexia’s militant attitude and Professor Lyall’s intimidated demeanor, the latter as out of character as the former was standard. Everyone was accustomed to Professor Lyall skulking about in the background, but he did that with an air of quiet confidence, not shame.
The major looked back and forth between the two, but instead of leaving them to their private discourse, he turned, slammed the door, and wedged a seat under the handle.
“Lyall, your disruptor, if you would?”
Professor Lyall reached into his waistcoat and pulled out a harmonic auditory resonance disruptor. He tossed the small crystal device to Channing, who set it atop the chair in front of the door and then quickly flicked the two tuning forks, activating the discordant humming.
Only then did he approach Lady Maccon. “What do I know?” He asked it as though he could predict her answer.
Alexia looked at Lyall.
Channing cocked his head. “Is this about the past? I told you no good could come of your meddling.”
Lyall raised his head, smelling the air. Then he turned to look at Channing.
For the first time, Alexia realized the two men were probably old friends. Sometime enemies, of course, but only in the manner of those who have been too long in each other’s company, possibly centuries. These two had known each other far longer than either had known Lord Maccon.
“You know?” Lyall said to the Gamma.
Channing nodded, all patrician beauty and aristocratic superiority as compared to Professor Lyall’s studied middle-class inoffensiveness.
The Beta looked at his hands. “Did you know all along?”
Channing sighed, his fine face becoming suffused with a brief paroxysm of agony. So brief Alexia thought she had imagined it. “What kind of Gamma do you take me for?”
Lyall laughed, a huff of pain. “A mostly absentee one.” There was no bitterness to the statement, simply fact. Channing was often away fighting Queen Victoria’s little wars. “I didn’t think you realized.”
“Realized what, exactly? That it was occurring? Or that you were taking the brunt of it so he’d stay off the rest of us? Who do you think kept the others from finding out what was really going on? I didn’t approve of you and Sandy—you know I didn’t—but that doesn’t mean I approved of what the Alpha was doing either.”
Alexia’s previous self-righteousness disintegrated under the implication of Channing’s comments. There was more to Lyall’s manipulations than she had realized. “Sandy? Who is Sandy?”
Professor Lyall twisted his lips into a little smile. Then he reached into his waistcoat—he always seemed to have everything he needed in that waistcoat of his—and pulled out a tiny leather-covered journal, navy blue with a very plain cover dated 1848 to 1850 in the upper left corner. It looked achingly familiar.