The Mask of Night (2 page)

"I contrived to meet Julien St. Juste at the Comédie Française,” Mélanie said, her voice thin to her own ears. “I persuaded him to take me to his rooms.” She slid over what had happened subsequently. There were only so many ways to describe such acts in any case, and she couldn’t bring herself to voice them to Josephine, who had also shared St. Juste’s bed. "He caught me searching for the paper. I thought he was asleep."

"You
thought
—"

"I took every precaution M. O'Roarke taught me. But I misjudged it. St. Juste put a knife to my throat. It was no more than I deserved for my clumsiness.” She could still feel the imprint of steel against her collarbone. For a moment, she'd been sure her first mission would be her last. "But St. Juste asked who sent me. M. O'Roarke told me to admit the truth if I was caught, so I did so."

"And St. Juste—"

"He said I hadn't done badly all things considered. Far more seasoned agents had failed to outwit him.” The words stuck in her throat. The amusement in his gaze still stung. "He said he couldn't afford to give up the paper. But—” Mélanie looked into Josephine's eyes, repeating the speech word for word as that strange, violent man had repeated it to her. "He said you were one of the few people on this earth he'd never hurt. He said to tell you he would never use the information in that paper against you, and that should you ever have need of his services you could command him in anything."

The Empress closed her eyes for a moment. Lines stood out stark against her skin. "I'd be a fool to believe him."

"Yes. But in that moment I found myself doing so. I can't speak for the future, but for the present, I don't believe he will use the paper against you."

"Do you know what the paper contains?"

Mélanie swallowed, aware that she was picking her way through a field set with mines. It was common knowledge that Josephine Bonaparte had had lovers. But that one of her lovers was a spy known to serve the highest bidder was another matter entirely. What had led to the Empress’s entanglement with Julien St. Juste? And what secrets were contained in that paper she was so desperate to recover from him? That was the sort of knowledge powerful people killed to conceal. "No,” Mélanie said truthfully. “M. O'Roarke only told me what I needed to know to recognize the paper. And that it was in code."

"Surely you know how to break codes."

"I had no need to break this one. I was simply supposed to recover the paper and return it to you. And in the end I never saw it."

“But you knew how important it was that I recovered it.”

Tension pressed against Mélanie’s throat, sharp and lethal. A knife in her ribs in a crowded boulevard, a bungled robbery in a dark alley— Easily enough arranged, surely, and the Empress would have no more need to fear the inconvenient knowledge of a sixteen-year-old ex-whore turned spy. "It would be awkward for you if it fell into the wrong hands,” Mélanie said.

"You have a gift for understatement,
chérie
. It would be a disaster. Do you think I don’t hear the whispers? My husband’s family have never liked me, but now they and half the court are clamoring for him to divorce me.”

Mélanie recalled the one time she had seen Napoleon Bonaparte, handing Josephine down from a carriage before the Opéra. Even as a child, she hadn’t missed the tenderness in his eyes. “The Emperor loves—“

“The Emperor needs a son. Love is a feeble shield in the face of politics. And if he knew the contents of that paper you failed to recover from Julien St. Juste—“ Josephine began to laugh. The high, brittle sound split the candle-scented air and reverberated off the silk-hung walls.

Mélanie reached out to her, but as she did so, the door was flung open.

"
Maman!
” A gold-haired young woman in blue stopped short on the threshold. She cast a quick glance at Mélanie, then ran to the Empress's side.

"
Maman,
please, you'll make yourself ill.” The girl rocked Josephine in her arms.

As abruptly as it had started, the laughter ceased. Josephine pulled away from her daughter. "Enough,
chérie
."

"You mustn’t—"

"I'm all right," Josephine said in the tone of a woman used to having her smallest command obeyed.

The young woman darted a quick glance at Mélanie. She must be Hortense de Beauharnais Bonaparte, Mélanie realized. Josephine's daughter from her first marriage, now the wife of Napoleon's younger brother.

Josephine straightened her back and smoothed her shawl. "This is
Mlle.
Lescaut, Hortense. Raoul O'Roarke engaged her to do a service for me."

Hortense gave an artless, unaffected smile that held none of the hauteur Mélanie would have expected from royalty. "M. O’Roarke has always been a good friend to us. You have my thanks, mademoiselle.” She cast a worried look at her mother. "It's over then? What's been worrying you these past days?"

"Over?” The Empress's hands closed on the folds of her shawl. "Oh, no,
chérie
. I fear it's only just beginning.” She caught Mélanie's wrist in a hard grip. "I must have your word. That you won't reveal tonight's events to anyone."

Mélanie looked into the desperate gaze of the Empress of France and received yet another shock on an evening full of them. For what she felt was not fear or remorse but a wholly unexpected welling of sympathy. "Madame—"

"Swear it."

Mélanie stared into Josephine's fever-bright gaze and made the promise she feared even then she would not be able to keep.

"I swear it."

Chapter 1

…regretter de n'avoir pu trouver, avec tant de braves, ma mort à Waterloo…

Charles-Auguste de Flahaut to Hortense Bonaparte, 1815

Ten years later

Berkeley Square, London

January 1820

Mélanie Fraser crossed eight feet of Savonnèrie carpet and hesitated before the gleaming oak of the dressing room door. Despite the coals burning behind the satin-stitched firescreen and the tapers sparkling in their girandole candlesticks, the bedchamber felt cold. Or perhaps the cold came from anticipation of the evening ahead.

She turned the handle and pushed the door open. The candlelight wavered, shifting over a tall figure in the act of fastening the cuffs of his black velvet doublet. The pier glass and the mirrored panels on the wardrobe doors reflected his image. She felt as though she had stumbled into one of her childrens’ picture books and was looking at some sort of fantastical creature of the night. A study in slashed black velvet and starched white linen, his face reduced to a full-lipped mouth and a shock of dark hair with a mask of jet beads covering the space in between.

"I can't manage the clasp on my necklace," she said, "and I sent Blanca downstairs."

He tugged off the mask, revealing sharp, Celtic cheekbones, deep set gray eyes, slanting dark brows. A collection of features as familiar to her as the parched slopes of the Cantabrian Mountains or the intricacies of a set of picklocks. But for a disconcerting moment she felt she was looking at a stranger. A stranger who happened to be her husband.

Charles Malcolm Kenneth Fraser, the man to whom she was bound by circumstance, a yellowing set of marriage lines, and a tangle of emotions she could not begin to unravel crossed to her side and took the necklace from her fingers. He slid his hands beneath the curls her maid had so carefully arranged and fastened the gold links of the clasp. His hands closed round her throat for a moment as he set the cool pearls against her skin.

"I never realized what an effective weapon a strand of pearls could make," he said.

"Fatal lack of imagination, darling. And you're usually so inventive."

"We all have our blind spots.” He pressed his lips to the nape of her neck. A shiver ran through her that had nothing to do with apprehension. Whatever had happened between them, some things never changed.

"Thank you, dearest.” She turned round and summoned up a bright smile. "It's nice to have all the armor safely in place."

He gave one of those unexpected schoolboy grins that always made her heart turn over. "Don't be pessimistic, Mel. For once, there's no reason to think we're going onto a battlefield."

"That depends on how one defines a London ballroom.” Mélanie recalled her conversation over the teacups that afternoon with her friend Isobel Lydgate, the hostess of this evening’s masquerade ball. “Bel told me she didn't know what to be more worried about tonight—Whigs and Tories coming to blows over the Corn Laws or Russian and Austrian attachés quarreling about the Polish situation."

"Or Bonapartists and Ultra Royalists debating the future of France?"

"It seemed politic not to mention that."

"Tactful as always, wife.”

"Survival instinct."

He lifted his cloak from a shield-back chair and watched her for a moment, with that look he'd so often worn in the last two months. As though she were a code he was searching for the key to.

Her throat went tight. A betraying weakness. She turned, perhaps a little too quickly, and went back into the bedroom. Her cloak and mask and beaded reticule lay decorously on the striped green satin bench at the foot of the bed. She picked up the mask and found herself looking at the mahogany four-poster. In the shifting balance of power that was their marriage, it too had been a battlefield, more often than she cared to admit.

Sometimes she could still not quite believe where her life had brought her. Ten years ago, she had been a young agent on her first mission, fired by Republican fervor. Seven years ago, in the course of a mission during the Peninsular War, she had met a British agent named Charles Fraser. Charles had believed her masquerade as a war refugee in need of protection. So well that to her own surprise, he had asked her to marry him. And she had accepted.

A tactical marriage that positioned her perfectly to spy for the Bonapartist French. The sort of cool, ruthless decision a good spy makes. Only then she had made the fatal mistake that no agent could afford to make. She had fallen in love. Worse, she had fallen in love with her own husband, her enemy, a man whom she could never tell the truth of her identity. Even when the French were defeated at Waterloo and she stopped her work as a spy, she had known that if Charles ever learned the truth of her past their marriage would be over.

And then two months ago, the unthinkable had happened. Their six-year-old son had been abducted, precipitating a chain of events that led to Charles learning she had been a Bonapartist spy. For a time, she’d been sure she’d never see him look at her with anything but hatred. But somehow they were still together. They had their son back and they were reconstructing their marriage. Lying in his arms in their darkened bedchamber, she could even believe their marriage might one day be stronger for the truth being in the open. She had far more than she had ever dared to hope for. And the devil of it was, every time Charles told her he loved her, she knew she didn’t deserve it.

She draped the cloak over her arm, slipped her wrist through the silver strap on the reticule, and returned to the dressing room doorway. Her husband was settling his cloak over his shoulders with the ease of one used to disguises. "Charles—"

"Yes?"

She pressed her finger over a wrinkle in her glove. "Thank you."

"For what?” He knotted the silk cords on his cloak.

"If you have to ask, you aren't the man I take you for."

"Which is entirely possible.” His gaze moved over face, her pearl-dressed hair, her black velvet Elizabethan gown. "We're only going to a ball given by two of our closest friends."

"Did I say otherwise?"

"I can read your silences rather well."

She tucked a curl behind her ear. "It's nothing."

"Surely you can lie better than that."

"I'm afraid"—the words caught for a moment, because she wasn't used to admitting to being afraid of anything—"I'm afraid it's too early."

"We can't hide forever.” He stretched out a hand and cupped her cheek.

She leaned her cheek against his palm. Everything he risked by being married to her reverberated through her mind. If her past was exposed, at best he’d lose the political career he was so carefully building and the friendship of people he’d known since boyhood. At worst he’d be branded a traitor himself. “I’m an appallingly selfish woman,” she said.

“Don’t talk twaddle, Mel.” He took her hand and laced his fingers through her own. “We’ll get through this.”

Something prickled behind her eyelids that might have been tears. “You sound so very sure.”

“Because we don’t have any other option. And because I know just how much I love you. And I think I know how much you love me.”

“Love is a feeble shield in the face of politics,” she said, echoing something the Empress Josephine had once said to her. Not long before Napoleon Bonaparte divorced her.

“Only if one has one’s priorities the wrong way round.” He lifted her hand and pressed his lips against her palm. “We’ve both made mistakes, sweetheart. We’ve both had complicated loyalties. But the fact that we’re together now matters far more than why we married in the first place.”

She let herself lean into him for a moment, resting her head against the familiar warmth of his shoulder. “You’re very brave, darling, but I know just what you’re risking.”

He touched her hair, lightly so as not to disarrange it. “I could walk away from it all tomorrow and be happy as long as I had you and the children.”

“But I couldn’t bear to see you do it.” Her voice came out husky.

“And with any luck you won’t have to.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Do you want to send our regrets and not go to the ball?"

She drew back and summoned up one of the bright smiles she’d worn like armor for years. "No, I was just indulging in a craven moment. We can’t fail Bel and Oliver.” Oliver and Isobel Lydgate were two of their closest friends, precisely the sort of friends she didn’t want Charles to lose because of her past. Oliver had gone to Oxford with Charles and they now sat in Parliament together. “Bel said she needed some friendly faces. There's a throng of new attachés and
charges d'affaires
on the guest list. I'm not going to recognize half of them."