Secrets of a Lady (39 page)

He looked down at the hand clasped in his, the smooth rounded nails, the delicate fingers, the porcelain skin that smelled of roses and vanilla. He thought of his own childhood. His parents had been only erratic presences, and tutors and governesses had come and gone with depressing regularity. But he and his brother and sister had taken it for granted that they would always have their rambling, centuries-old house to live in, with a fire and wax candles in the schoolroom in the bargain. Whatever emotional deprivations they had suffered, they had never questioned that ample meals would be set before them each day on the second-best Spode china. “Food and a roof over your head must have seemed a promise of heaven,” he said.

“Yes.” She tried to slide her hand out of his, but he kept hold of it. “It could have been worse,” she said after a moment. “I think it was a bit cleaner than the Gilded Lily. But I’d been a better pickpocket than I was a whore. My acting skills had a tiresome tendency to desert me in the bedchamber. At least then. I was too young.”

She fell silent, her gaze frozen, as though to look at him was too great a risk, even for her. He remembered his words that morning in the Cantabrian Mountains.
I’d like to kill them for you
. Even that seemed inadequate now.

He lifted her hand to his lips and held it there for a moment. She turned her gaze to him and read his thoughts as she so often did. “Many women face as much and more.”

“Most of the world lives in squalor. That doesn’t lessen the horror. Or it shouldn’t.” He laced his fingers through her own. “No wonder you jumped at the chance when O’Roarke found you.”

“He was the first man in all the months I’d been in the brothel who looked at me like I was a person. It was amazingly seductive. He asked me questions about myself. He learned I’d been an actress. He talked to me about the war. After a few visits, he too offered me employment.”

“A chance at vengeance.”

“In part.” Her brows drew together, sooty smudges against her parchment-white skin. “But it’s too simple to reduce it to that. He gave me something to believe in beyond survival. He reminded me of Rousseau and Thomas Paine and William Godwin—all the ideas I’d been raised on.”

“He could hardly have turned you loose as a spy with nothing but Rousseau and Paine and Godwin to guide you.”

“Hardly. He showed me how to wield a knife and fire a gun and pick a lock. He taught me to create a cover story and stick with it. He made sure I could manage the right accent to pass myself off as a native of any part of Spain or France. He drilled me on army ranks and court protocol.” She paused a moment. “And after he took me out of the brothel, he didn’t touch me again until I asked him to.”

“If he cared a scrap for you, why the hell didn’t he—”

“Send me off somewhere safe? I’d have gone mad, darling. I didn’t want to be safe. I wanted to fight.”

“You could have been killed.”

“So could you, any number of times during the war.” She touched her fingers to his hair. “Raoul and I saw a chance to remake the world. You may disagree with our methods, but you of all people should agree that it needs remaking.”

“Oh, yes. The question is, into what?”

She was silent for a moment. “My father never forgave Napoleon for crowning himself emperor. But when the French moved into Spain, he thought Joseph Bonaparte’s regime offered all sorts of promise.” She scanned his face with a familiar challenge. “Can you really claim Spain wouldn’t be better off now if we’d won?”

“No. You’ve heard me say as much. And yet many Spaniards hated the monarchy but also wanted the French the hell out of their country.”

“A palpable hit, dearest. Those same Spaniards were naïve enough to think Britain would support their bid for freedom when the French were gone.”

“A far more palpable hit, wife.” He realized, belatedly, what he had called her. He looked down at their intertwined hands. “That was what kept you going all those years? A dream of freedom?”

“Oh, no, darling.” An edge hardened her voice. “I’m neither so naïve nor so saintly. Part of it was the pure love of the game—the challenge of a new gambit, the thrill of becoming another character, the sheer bloody exhilaration of being able to pull off a deception. You must have felt that yourself.”

He started to voice a denial, then forced his mind back to his days in the Peninsula and later in Vienna and Brussels. He could taste the wine-sweet rush of triumph on his tongue even now. Triumph at passing himself off as a French staff officer, at breaking a code that was supposed to be unbreakable, at rescuing two of his men from a mud hut that was an excuse for a prison without a shot being fired. “Yes,” he said. “Far more often than I’d like to admit.”

Her gaze moved over his face, as though it was important that she make him understand. “You build up a shell. You become so caught up in the rules of the game that you quite lose track of the outer edges. You forget that you were playing the game for a reason. And then suddenly you remember and you wonder if that reason can survive when you’ve worn your own integrity to shreds.”

He thought of her reasons for playing the game and wondered how his own held up in comparison. “Can it?” he said.

She shook her head. Her gaze at once held rueful regret and stark torment. “Oh, darling, if I knew the answer to that—”

They sat in silence. A curious peace had settled over the room, the peace of an unexpected, tentative balance. Still holding his wife’s hand, Charles looked into the leaping flames and tried to recast their past yet again in the light of her revelations. Those revelations certainly made clearer the steps that had brought her to the moment she agreed to be his wife. Did they excuse her actions? Mélanie wouldn’t thank him for saying so. He could almost hear her telling him not to dare deny her the free will to be responsible for her own actions. Beneath the dazzling charm, she was every bit as uncompromising as he was himself. And yet—With her words echoing in his head, he could not feel the anger he had before.

Her fingers stirred in his own. “Charles?”

“Yes?”

“Whatever happens, don’t let Jessica be stifled. Give her an education, let her travel, give her an independent income. Make her as free as a woman can be.”

The speech at first seemed a complete non sequitur. But in light of their whole conversation, perhaps it was not. “Of course.” He squeezed her hand. “We’ve always agreed about that.”

“If I’m not there.” She stared at the smoke-blackened iron of the hob grate. “Promise.”

The intensity in her voice shook him as much as her words. “I told you I wouldn’t take the children away from you.”

“Yes. But—”

He gripped her hand tightly, as though he could anchor both of them to safety. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Mel.”

She turned her gaze to him. Her eyes held visions of a future he would not let himself contemplate. “You can’t possibly know that, Charles. We were both almost killed today.” Her voice turned low and urgent.
“Promise.”

A pain closed round his chest that was not rage but fear. He looked into her eyes and inclined his head. “I promise.”

Chapter 24

M
élanie drew a steadying breath and forced her hands to unclench for the third time since she and Charles and Edgar had been shown into the blue parlor of Frances Dacre-Hammond’s house in Brighton. Edgar was staring at the fire grate, as though if he looked hard enough he could find answers in the gleaming brass. Charles was pacing, his walking stick thudding against the Savonnerie carpet.

Her revelations to Charles in the inn parlor in Alfriston were a thing of the past. She felt the echoes sometimes when Charles’s gaze rested upon her, but their world had shrunk to the next few hours and the task of finding Helen Trevennen.

They had been waiting for Lady Frances for a nerve-scraping ten minutes. It was just past nine-thirty on Wednesday morning—more than twenty-four hours since Colin’s disappearance, less than four days until Carevalo’s Saturday-night deadline. If Lady Frances could not help them, searching for Helen Trevennen in Brighton would indeed be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Just when Mélanie was ready to run up to Lady Frances’s boudoir and drag her husband’s aunt downstairs, the door opened. Lady Frances swept into the room and surveyed them like a queen regarding a trio of upstarts who have invaded her audience chamber. As usual, she was dressed in shades of purple, in this case a morning dress of twilled lilac sarcenet that turned her eyes the same color. Her hair—which had only turned a brighter gold with the years—had been hastily dressed, but she wore a full suite of cameo jewelry.

“What on earth are you doing here?” she said in the low silk-velvet voice that could command the attention of every drawing room in London (and, rumor had it, had whispered across the pillows of half the cabinet, two royal dukes, and possibly the Prince of Wales). “The only one in the family who’s up at such an ungodly hour is Chloe and she’s at the park with her governess.” Chloe was Lady Frances’s youngest child, a girl of ten. “I know London has become horridly modern, but I wasn’t aware that it was the custom to pay calls before noon there any more than it is here.”

Charles moved forward, leaning on his walking stick, took her hand, and kissed her cheek. “Our apologies, Godmama. We wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t very serious indeed.”

A smile broke across her angular features. “You haven’t called me ‘Godmama’ since you were at Harrow. You must want something.” She drew back and looked up at him. “Good God, Charles, what have you been doing to yourself? You look dreadful.” She touched his cheek, an uncharacteristically maternal gesture. “You’d better tell me about it. I’m having chocolate sent in, since I didn’t have a chance to finish my morning cup in my boudoir.”

She walked forward, the folds of her gown clinging to the long line of her legs. “Mélanie, you’re looking indecently beautiful as usual, despite the fact that you obviously haven’t had enough sleep in the last twenty-four hours. You must be careful, my dear, even a complexion like yours needs tending. Edgar, I’m glad to see you in company with your brother.” She sank down on a chair covered in cerulean blue satin, positioned so the light fell at a flattering angle across her face. “Now, tell me what’s happened.”

Charles returned to the settee. “It’s about Colin,” he said, and gave as concise an account of Colin’s disappearance as was possible.

Each time, Mélanie found it harder to sit still while the story was told. Each time, the precious minutes spent going over already familiar ground grated more on her strained nerves. She forced herself to watch her husband’s aunt as Charles spoke. Lady Frances’s shrewd eyes went wide. Her face paled, so that despite the angle of the light, lines stood out against her carefully tended skin. She did not interrupt with questions, though a footman came in with a chocolate pot in the midst of the story. Lady Frances poured with hands that were not quite steady. When Charles finished, she sat in silence for a long moment. The rich, sweet aroma of chocolate and the musky scent of her perfume drifted through the air. Frances Dacre-Hammond had been privy to half the political secrets in London and had broken up more than one marriage, but Mélanie had never seen her so completely shocked.

“Good God.” Lady Frances put her hand to her throat, fingering her necklace. The sunlight flickered over the carved alabaster of the cameos. “I met that man Carevalo. He came to Brighton on a visit two years ago. Emily Cowper introduced us. At a card party at the Assembly Rooms. He seemed—”

“Crude. Charming.” A chill rang along Mélanie’s skin at the memory of that charm, exercised on her herself so recently. “Amusing. Harmless.” Her lips curled over the last word. She opened her reticule and took out the picture she’d drawn of Helen Trevennen. “Do you recognize this woman?”

Lady Frances held the sketch out at arm’s length, frowned, and at last reached into the pocket of her skirt for a pair of gilt-rimmed spectacles. She hooked the delicate wires over her ears. Her penciled brows drew into an unaccustomed frown. “There’s something familiar about the face, though I can’t quite place her. No, let me think.” She held up a hand before any of them could voice their disappointment.

Charles sat perfectly still, one white-knuckled hand gripping the Grecian arm of the settee. “Someone you’ve seen here? Recently?”

“No, not recently. But I think it was here.”

Mélanie wound the strap of her reticule through her shaking fingers. “Could you have seen her on the stage?”

“No. It was a social occasion, I’m sure of it. She was a lady. At least she lived like a lady, which is all any of us can say.” Lady Frances lifted her cup and took a sip of chocolate, her gaze still on the picture. Mélanie swallowed a scream of frustration and suppressed the impulse to dash her own chocolate cup against the Chinese wallpaper.

“Thanks to the prince, the world flocks to Brighton these days,” Lady Frances continued. “One sees people at the shops and the lending library and the Promenade without ever actually being introduced.”

“Perhaps she altered her appearance when she came here.” The steel links of the strap cut against Mélanie’s hands. “Her hair or—”

“That’s it.” Lady Frances snapped her fingers. “Her hair was quite dark, even darker than yours, Mélanie. Very dramatic and well done—you couldn’t tell it was dye. Not someone who moved in my set, but I must have seen her a handful of times.”

Charles leaned forward. “Where?”

“Not the Old Ship or the Castle Inn or the Assembly Rooms. Somewhere outdoors. The Promenade? That doesn’t quite seem right.”

“She was fond of horse races,” Charles said.

Lady Frances tapped her fingers against the picture. “Of course, the races. Excellent taste in clothes, dressed with propriety but never looked dowdy.”

“What was her name?” Charles asked.

“I haven’t the least idea, I’m afraid. I don’t believe we were ever formally introduced.”

Disappointment robbed Mélanie of speech for a moment. It was Charles who spoke. “When did you last see her?”