Secrets of a Lady (43 page)

“Humanity,” Charles said after a moment. “Though I must confess to being disappointed more often than I would care to admit.”

Edgar shook his head and turned away. Charles realized how far they had moved from the original conversation. Belatedly, he recognized Edgar’s gambit as the smokescreen it was. “You’re better at this than I credited, brother.”

Edgar walked back to the table and picked up his coffee. “Better at what?”

“Diverting the conversation.” Charles spread his fingers on the blue velvet of the chair back. “Mélanie thinks you were in love with Kitty.”

Edgar laughed, but the five-second pause before he spoke told volumes. “Women, even Mélanie, like to romanticize things.”

“I’m sorry,” Charles said. “I didn’t realize.”

Edgar stared at him. “Hell, Charles, don’t you ever miss anything?”

“In this case I was singularly blind. It was Mélanie who noticed and even then I wasn’t sure.” He hesitated, searching for the right words. “It can’t have been easy learning I was her lover. I’m sorry.”

“Most men were a little in love with Kitty Ashford. Truth to tell, I didn’t have the faintest idea you’d been more than a friend to her until the gossip after her death.” Edgar’s mouth twisted. “She seemed to me to be the purest of women.”

“I don’t excuse my own behavior, but you can hardly blame Kitty. Ashford had forfeited any right to fidelity.”

“He was her husband.”

“He was a rutting bastard who couldn’t keep his hands off the local women.”

Edgar thunked the coffee cup back onto the table. “It wasn’t Kitty who changed things between us. It goes back far longer.”

Charles fixed his gaze on the cream-and-gold patch of carpet in front of him. “When I got word of Mother’s death, I wanted nothing so much as to talk to you. By the time I got home the house was full of relatives and mourning rituals and there was no chance for private conversation. I got through it knowing that as soon as the house settled down for the night we could have one of our midnight conferences.”

The late-night conferences in one or the other of their bedchambers had been a tradition from the time they left the nursery. They would sit talking half the night on the hearth rug, toasting slices of bread with the poker and warming pans of chocolate over the spirit lamp. “But when I knocked at your room, you didn’t answer. You’d bolted the door. We never had a midnight conference again.” Charles looked up at his brother. “You can’t tell me that was because you’d suddenly discovered we view the world through different lenses.”

Edgar walked to the window that overlooked the back garden. He stared at the silvery trunk of a birch tree, though he seemed to be seeing beyond it. “Why does it matter to you so much?”

Charles crossed to the window and put his hands on Edgar’s shoulders. “Because I love you, brother mine. As it happens, there are only a handful of people on this planet I would say that to.” One of whom was held hostage and in danger of losing his life. Another of whom had lied to him from the moment he met her.

Edgar stared down at Charles’s hands on the blue cloth of his coat. A look crossed his face that seemed to Charles to echo his own sense of loss. “Charles—”

“We saw a boy killed today, Edgar. If Giles hadn’t flung himself into the fray, it would have been me. If we’d got tangled up differently, it easily could have been you. God knows what we have facing us when we get back to London. It’s no time to let things fester.”

Edgar looked up at him. The armor cracked open. For a moment Charles was looking into the blue eyes of the companion of his boyhood. Then Edgar wrenched himself from Charles’s hold and hurled his coffee cup into the fireplace. “Christ, Charles. How many ways do I have to tell you that there’s nothing
to
fester?” He stared at the wreckage of snow-white porcelain amid the coals in the grate. “You’re the one who keeps saying we can’t afford to think of anything but Colin.”

He flung across the room and nearly collided with Mélanie as she came through the door, clad in a dove-colored gown, her hair neatly pinned. She put a hand on his arm to steady them both. Her gaze slid from him to Charles and lingered for a moment.

“The carriage is ready,” she said, in the silver-toned voice she used to smooth over diplomatic contretemps. “Shall we go? With luck we can be in London by eight o’clock.”

Chapter 27

“Y
ou were right. Edgar was in love with Kitty.”

Mélanie turned from the mullioned panes of the inn parlor window to look at her husband. They were at the King’s Head in Cuckfield, waiting for a fresh team of horses. Edgar had been silent on the first stage of their journey and had once again taken himself off to the coffee room when they reached the inn. “He admitted it?” she said.

“When backed into a corner. That seems to be the only way my brother confides in me anymore.” Charles paced the narrow length of the room. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that I misread Carevalo, considering how blind I’ve been to those closest to me.”

Mélanie leaned against the casement. Her body ached with exhaustion and at the same time thrummed with the need for action. She felt naked and vulnerable, as though the layers of goffered linen and pin-tucked sarcenet and ruched velvet had been stripped from her body. Layers that constrained her but also defined who she was, who she had been for seven years.

That day on the Perthshire beach, when she realized what Charles meant to her, she had been sure he could see through to the truth of who she was. Perhaps he still could. The question now was whether she could see that inner core herself. Charles had accused her of lying for so long that she couldn’t know herself anymore, and he’d been more accurate than she cared to admit. Even with the lies stripped away, she wasn’t the woman she’d been seven years ago, before she met him.

“My father used to tell actors you can never get a character truly, definitively right,” she said. “You can only get
your
version of the character right, because you have to make choices and fill in the gaps the playwright leaves. Surely that’s even more the case with another person than a character in a play. You can never really know what another person is thinking or feeling. You have to make guesses and assumptions. The picture keeps changing with new evidence.” She studied her husband, thinking of all she had learned about him in the past two days. “Like looking at a faceted glass from different angles. Or stripping away layers of paint.”

“Except that with a character in a play there can be more than one interpretation,” Charles said. “With another person there is some core of truth, buried beneath all those layers.”

She looked into his eyes. It was a strange relief and an unexpected terror to be able to do so without trying to hide any part of herself. “But it’s difficult enough to know the truth buried within ourselves, let alone someone else.”

He returned her gaze for a moment. Then he crossed the room in a burst of restlessness. He’d left his walking stick leaning against the wall. “Edgar says we grew apart inevitably as we grew older. Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps he was always more important to me than I was to him. God knows he’s always been able to form bonds more easily than I have.”

Tenderness washed over her, like the familiarity of a well-worn cloak. “Oh, darling, Edgar’s been measuring himself against you his whole life. In a lot of ways he must be fearfully jealous.”

“Edgar? Jealous of me?” Charles stared at her. “Try again, Mel, or I’ll start thinking you’re as lacking in perception as I am.”

“How could he not be jealous? His brilliant elder brother who thinks he can handle anything and who’s very nearly right. Who’s always known who he is and has never craved acceptance. Who’s maddeningly, infuriatingly self-assured. Because I expect Edgar sees the self-assurance but not the scars underneath. You don’t let very many people see the scars, Charles.”

“Don’t talk twaddle, Mel. All Edgar saw in me was a bookish elder brother who was all right when he was the only companion available but was a dead bore next to his school friends. Although he did admit he was jealous of our marriage.”

She fought the urge to look away from his eyes. “As I said, we can all form a picture that’s incorrect.”

Charles stood watching her, his expression unreadable. The pressure of his gaze was suddenly more than she could bear, like a wound ripped open. She crossed to the fireplace, blinded by a betraying onslaught of tears.

“Mel?” Charles said behind her.

She knew that voice. It was the tone he used when he thought she might need him but didn’t want to press her. To hear it now, when she had forfeited all right to his care, was like a knife cut.

She forced back the tears and turned to him with an attempt at a smile. His face held the bone-deep tenderness of her husband who loved her, who had forgotten for the moment everything that lay between them.

“We know where to find Helen Trevennen,” Charles said. “She has the ring or at least she had it once—Violet Goddard saw it. We’ll make her give us the ring or tell us what she did with it. We’re going to get Colin back.”

She nodded, because she couldn’t let herself believe anything else. It occurred to her that once they had Colin back, once the crisis was past, the enforced intimacy between herself and Charles would be at an end. The future was still uncertain terrain, set with mines. This might be her last chance to reach him.

She sought for the right words. She felt strangely unsteady, as though she’d been forced to abandon the script and improvise in the middle of a performance. She was still unaccustomed to talking to Charles without the ever-present voice at the back of her head critiquing everything she said lest she unwittingly give herself away. She almost missed the clear boundaries of her role. “After Waterloo, I had no faith left in anything,” she said, looking into his eyes, willing him not to turn away from her. “All those years of fighting and compromising and twisting ideals to meet necessity and what was the point? We’d lost. The monarchies I hated were restored in France and in Spain, foreign troops overran Paris, the very symbols of the revolution were obliterated. The one thing that kept me going was you.”

His brows rose. “Doing it much too brown, Mel. Don’t pretend—”

“Because no matter what, you still believed you were involved in mankind. You still believed in the future. You still believed you could make something better of the world than what you’d found.”

Charles gave a shout of bitter laughter. “Irony of ironies. Good God, we’re a pretty pair. Don’t turn me into a false ideal, Mel. If I believed in anything then—if I believe in anything now—it’s only because you helped me find that belief, my enemy agent of a wife.”

“That’s not true. When you were at Oxford—”

“I was filled with high-sounding ideals.” The bitterness was in his voice now, sharp as acid. “I wrote reams about the rights of the individual and the evils of inherited privilege and the horrors of the workhouse. I even made speeches when I had an audience who’d listen, which usually meant a tavern full of drunken undergraduates. But what did I do when I left university? Did I stand for Parliament or join a radical society or start a reformist newspaper? No. I ran away.”

“I’d hardly call joining the diplomatic service running away, darling.”

“I became a diplomat at least as much to get away from my family and everything in Britain as because I thought I could do any sort of good.”

“Your mother had killed herself, your father had made it clear he didn’t love you and never had, your brother had turned into a stranger. Of course you wanted to get away. But you can’t tell me you didn’t think what you were doing made a difference.”

“At first. I thought the French had no business in Spain, it’s true. I met Spaniards who didn’t support Bonaparte but who saw the war as a chance to change their country for the good. For a long time, I was fool enough to think our government would support them. But when I saw the brutality on all sides, when I saw the contempt many of our soldiers had for their Spanish allies, the goddamned reactionary entrenchment of the Foreign Office—” He shook his head. “You said you could become so caught up in the game you forgot the reason you were playing it in the first place. I realized, when you said that, how truly hollow my own reasons for playing the game had been. Like you, I could be caught up in the sheer challenge, but it was harder and harder to believe any good could come of the war. For a long time I told myself that as long as I had some sort of belief in myself, I could make a difference, at least on an individual level. After Kitty’s death—”

He turned his head, as though whatever his face might reveal was too intimate to share with her. She suppressed the impulse to take him in her arms. Kitty’s death was a scar too private for her to touch.

He looked back at her, his gaze a wasteland. “After Kitty killed herself, life seemed a farce without meaning. If I was destined to make any difference in the world, it seemed to be only to bring destruction on those I loved. I was going through the motions when I was sent after the ring. Then I found you.”

“And you couldn’t give up because you were needed. I know you, Charles. You’d never let down someone who needed you. If I hadn’t reminded you of it, something else would have.”

“Christ, Mel.” He took a quick step toward her, then checked himself. His eyes were angry. “Don’t cheapen what was between us. It may have been lies, but you can’t reduce it to something I could have found with anyone.” He scraped his hand through his hair. “I loved Kitty, but loving her scarcely brought out the best in me. You did. With you I found something in myself I thought I’d lost. How could I back away from life when you attacked it with every fiber of your being? How could I turn away from the future when the future was a legacy we’d bequeath to our child? Besides—” He paused for a heartbeat, his gaze steady on her face. “In a world where I could feel what I came to feel for you, anything seemed possible.”

For a moment she was robbed of speech or even breath. This was Charles talking, Charles who had not said “I love you” to her until they’d been married more than a year, whose feelings were more often expressed with a look or a touch than with words, who was more likely to quote someone else’s impassioned declaration than to frame one for himself. That he should make such a declaration now, when she had destroyed his trust, when the revelations about Kitty had made her question the very nature of his feeling for her, was at once so sweet and so painful it tore her in two.