Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  That last was Addison, in impeccable French. At least his valet had survived the attack. A breath of relief whistled through Charles’s lungs.

  “You’re lying.” This was another French speaker. “There’s bedding for at least two more. Where are they?”

  Silence followed, and then the smack of a hand connecting with a cheek.

  “I don’t know,” Addison said, his voice as cool and controlled as ever. “Away from here, if they have any sense.”

  “Impudent bastard.” The words were accompanied by the sound of another slap.

  “The lieutenant needs tending to,” Addison said. “He’s badly wounded.”

  “No one gets cosseted until we find the others. Georges! Michel! Search the woods. We don’t want them sneaking up on us unawares.”

  In the cold frozen earth of the gully, Charles’s hand had closed round a large rock. He hurled it as far as he could in the opposite direction, away from him and Mélanie, away from the dead dragoon.

  An old trick, perfected in his boyhood to throw his tutor off the scent, but as the rock crashed through the underbrush, the French leader gave an excited cry. “That way! They may be armed.”

  Boots tramped across the ground in the opposite direction. Two of the French soldiers were out of the clearing for the moment. Charles couldn’t tell how many were left. He motioned for Mélanie to stay where she was and crawled on his stomach to the edge of the gully.

  The smell of blood washed over him, sweet and choking. He gagged, swallowed, then squinted through the tangle of thornbushes.

  The rising sun pierced the fog. The light glared against the snow, but he could see enough to make out the two French dragoons left in the clearing. Both were armed with muskets. The stocks glinted in the light.

  Addison was leaning against a large boulder, his arm round Blanca. Blanca appeared to be unhurt, but Addison’s right leg was stretched out at an awkward angle. Sergeant Baxter and fresh-faced Private Smithford sat across the clearing from them. Blood showed on the white facings of their coats, but it might not be their own. The other red-coated figures were sprawled over the ground. One of them, probably Jennings, gave another low moan. Charles couldn’t tell whether any of the others lived. The horses, miraculously, appeared to be unharmed.

  One of the dragoons walked up to Blanca. “She’s a pretty thing, Corporal. She’ll liven up the journey back to camp.” He bent and stuck his hand down her bodice. Blanca spat full in his face. The soldier lifted his musket and swung it against the side of her head.

  The blow fell half on Blanca, half on Addison, who had flung up his arm to protect her. Charles reached for his pistol, then stilled his hand. That wouldn’t solve anything, not with the French soldiers positioned as they now were, both armed.

  Smithford jumped to his feet with a roar of outrage. He couldn’t be much more than eighteen and he’d been making eyes at Blanca ever since they’d found her.

  The second dragoon, who had the insignia of a corporal, whirled round and fired a musket ball straight into Smithford’s chest. Smithford’s eyes opened in astonishment. He made a gurgling sound low in his throat. Then he collapsed face-first in the dirt.

  “Asesino,” Blanca cried.

  “I said I’d shoot anyone who moved.” The corporal was ramming a fresh ball into his musket. “You, the pasty one who speaks French. You tell them.”

  Addison murmured to Blanca and Baxter in English. The underbrush stirred beside Charles. Mélanie crawled up next to him. Charles turned to her. Even before she began to whisper in his ear, he knew what she was going to suggest. It was madness. And it was their only hope.

  Charles held himself motionless behind the thornbushes and watched as Mélanie stumbled into the clearing, gasping, her cloak billowing round her, her hair whipping about her face.

  “Blanca! Dios gracias!” Mélanie flung herself down beside the younger girl, seemingly heedless of the dragoons.

  Blanca turned her head, the red mark clearly visible on her face. “Oh, Mélanie, porque—”

  “So. Another señorita.” The dragoon who had hit Blanca stared down at Mélanie. Charles couldn’t read his expression, but he could hear the combination of anger and lust in the Frenchman’s voice.

  “Sir?” One of the soldiers who had gone to search called out through the trees. “Have you found them?”

  “Only one. Do you see anything?”

  “There are a couple of dead Spaniards, but no sign of an Englishman.”

  “Keep searching.” The corporal looked at Mélanie. “The other man,” he said in halting Spanish. “Where is he?”

  “Who?” Mélanie shrank back against the boulder. Her hands were tucked into the folds of her cloak, as though for protection. Behind the thornbushes, Charles eased the musket onto his shoulder and sighted down the barrel.

  “The man with you.” The corporal gestured toward the empty sleeping blankets.

  “At least now we know why they slipped away from camp,” the other dragoon murmured in his own tongue. “Too fastidious to do it in front of his men. I expect he’s left her nice and warm and wet.”

  Blanca looked up at him. She had understood the implication if not the words. “Bastardo.”

  The dragoon raised the butt of his musket again. Mélanie coughed once, loudly. Then all at once her left hand wasn’t tucked into her cloak but was pointing at the dragoon. She shot him before he had a chance to see the pistol she held. At the same moment, Charles fired off a musket shot that caught the corporal full in the chest.

  Both Frenchmen fell. Mélanie sprang to her feet. Charles ran into the clearing.

  Footsteps crashed through the underbrush. Charles pulled his unfired pistol from his belt. Baxter snatched a musket from one of the dead dragoons.

  The footsteps raced past. “Running away,” Baxter said. “They’ve got horses in the trees yonder. I don’t think they’ll stop to bury their own dead. They must know they’re outnumbered now.”

  Mélanie dropped down beside Jennings, who was making incoherent noises. His chest was soaked bright red, and blood dribbled out the corner of his mouth. She took off her cloak and spread it over him. “Lie still, Lieutenant. It’s all right now. Blanca, we need fresh water from the stream. Are both the dragoons dead, Mr. Fraser?”

  “Without question.” Charles straightened up from checking the pulse of the second dragoon. The other four British soldiers were flung about the rocks, their bodies twisted and bloodied and shattered by bullets.

  “Smithford’s gone, too, poor devil,” Baxter said.

  “Are you hurt, Baxter?”

  “Me? Nay, untouched, sir.” Baxter brushed his hand over the blood on his coat as though surprised it was there.

  Charles dropped down opposite Mélanie. She sat back on her heels and looked up at him. Her face was smeared with blood that must have sprayed from the dragoon she’d shot. Her eyes held a look that was part shock, part horror, part sheer guts.

  Charles brushed his fingers against her cheek. He stripped off his greatcoat and laid it over Jennings, then turned to his valet, who was still slumped against the rock. “How bad’s your leg, Addison?”

  “Broken, I think. I’m afraid you may have to give me the use of your horse, sir.”

  “Gladly. But you had only to ask, you know. You needn’t have gone to the trouble of getting your leg broken.” Charles got to his feet and jerked his head in the direction the French had run. “I’ll reconnoiter. Make sure they’re gone.”

  They were gone, as best he could tell. They’d left three of their own dead sprawled among the trees. Not twenty paces off, he found the bodies of the two Spanish bandits. Poor bastards. They’d come to the rendezvous early. It was their bad luck to have arrived in the middle of the fight.

  Charles returned to the clearing to find that Baxter had kindled a fresh fire beside Jennings, and the women had contrived a splint for Addison’s leg.

  Jennings died just after eleven, with barely a sound. It took them nea
rly the whole of the morning to tend to the dead—English, French, and Spanish.

  They found nothing resembling the Carevalo Ring, but one of the Spanish bandits had a leather pouch on a cord round his neck. Someone had ripped his shirt open and loosened the drawstring on the pouch. It seemed the Carevalo Ring had existed after all. And it was now in the hands of the French.

  Chapter 7

  London

  November 1819

  “S uppose Carevalo’s right, damn his eyes,” Charles said. “Suppose the French soldiers didn’t make off with the ring.”

  Mélanie turned her head to look at her husband. His voice was level, almost conversational, but the light slanting through the carriage window glanced off his clenched hands. His knuckles were white. She could see him sifting through the pieces of the past, rearranging them in his head, searching for a break in the pattern. She had been doing the same herself since they left Raoul O’Roarke at Mivart’s Hotel scarcely ten minutes ago. Save that for her, the picture was different.

  She put her hand over her abdomen, flat again—how proud she had been of it, how inconsequential it now seemed—nearly three years after Jessica’s birth. For all the danger seven years ago, at least Colin had been with them, tucked safely inside her.

  She reached for Charles’s hand. “Perhaps you were right that it was a wild-goose chase and that the bandits never had the ring. It was all a trick to lure you into the mountains so they could steal the gold.”

  “Perhaps. But one of them did have something hidden in that pouch round his neck. Which brings us back to the French dragoons. Unless one of our own party somehow managed to steal it after the fight. Baxter, Blanca, you, or me. Addison couldn’t have moved with his leg.” Charles laced his fingers through her own. She could feel the warmth of his hand through the ecru kid of her glove. “Well, mo chridh?” he said. “Are you hiding it in your jewel box?”

  She managed a smile, but it turned wobbly. “I wish to God I were.”

  He stared down at their clasped hands. “Suppose Blanca stumbled across the dead bandits when you sent her to the stream for water after the French soldiers ran off.”

  “Blanca might rip the shirts off a pair of live men, but she’d scream bloody murder at the sight of dead ones. And she wouldn’t steal.”

  “You can’t know that, Mel.” His fingers tightened round her own. “You can never really know what another person might be capable of.”

  Beneath the velvet of her pelisse and the sarcenet of her gown and the linen of her chemise, her insides twisted, as if someone had turned a knife in her gut. “No,” she said. “I suppose not. What about Baxter?”

  “I don’t see how he’d have had time. Unless the ring wasn’t in the pouch after all, and Baxter found it later, when we were burying the bodies. I still think the likeliest explanation is that the French soldiers made off with the ring and disposed of it for their own purposes.”

  She drew in her breath. The air in the carriage was close and choking, thick with the smell of Charles’s shaving soap and her perfume and the smoke from the charcoal brazier at their feet.

  “Stiffen up your sinews, my sweet,” Charles said. “I’ll talk to d’Arnot at the French embassy. He has contacts among the former Bonapartist officers. If Carevalo traced the dragoons, we can, too.”

  “I should think so. In half the time.” She made her voice light, but panic closed tight round her heart. Her free hand curled into a fist, so hard she heard a stitch give way in her glove. She had an impulse to smash her hand through the watered-silk upholstery, the polished mahogany fittings, the plate-glass window. “Oh, God, darling, I want him back. I’d give anything—”

  “So would I,” Charles said. Blue shadows of fatigue drew at his face. He had looked like that on the night of the battle of Waterloo, when their house in Brussels shook from cannon fire and the hall was filled with wounded soldiers. And on the nights Colin and Jessica had been born, when he’d sat beside her, in defiance of custom. He’d held her hand then, too.

  She had a sudden memory of how Colin had felt when the doctor first placed him in her arms, so small and insubstantial, with a wobbly head and squirmy limbs. Charles had reached out and cupped his hand round the baby’s head. The warmth and wonder on his face had brought tears to her eyes.

  “We’ll talk to Blanca and Addison,” Charles said, in the voice of an outnumbered commander recounting a desperate battle plan with calm certainty. “We’ll call on Baxter. We’ll go to the French embassy and talk to d’Arnot.”

  She nodded, only half hearing, because she had come to her own decision. She was going to have to tell Charles the truth, all of it. She had known that from the moment they read Carevalo’s letter, though she hadn’t fully admitted it until now.

  She was not as sick or terrified at the prospect as she ought to be. Perhaps her fear for Colin left little room for other emotions. If they could get him back, nothing else mattered. And they were not going to get him back unless Charles learned the truth.

  She looked up at her husband. The familiar, ironic eyes, the full, generous mouth, the thick hair that would never quite lie smooth. She remembered the moment he had proposed to her, on a chill December night on a balcony overlooking the Tagus River. She had thought then that he was mad. She had wondered if he would ever be able to think of himself as Colin’s father. She had been a fool. Charles was the sanest man she knew, and once he gave his loyalty, he was unswerving. His capacity for love was a well she had not plumbed the depths of.

  Yet.

  Blanca sprang to her feet, poplin skirts snapping. “How can you accuse me of such a thing? You think I am a thief? You think I have no honor?”

  Mélanie crossed the small salon and took the younger woman by the hands. “We’re not accusing you, querida. We’re asking a question. We have to be sure, for Colin’s sake.”

  Outrage, fear, and compassion flickered across Blanca’s face. She let out a sigh that ruffled the muslin collar of her gown and made her hands tremble. “I’m sorry, Mélanie.” She rarely called Mélanie by her given name when Charles was present. It was a sign of how greatly her composure had been shaken. She looked straight into Mélanie’s eyes. “I didn’t take the ring. I wouldn’t have even if I’d seen the dead bandits. And I never saw them.”

  Mélanie squeezed Blanca’s hands. Her gaze went to the Meissen clock on the mantel. The filigree hands inexorably marked the time she had already allowed to slip by since her son’s disappearance. It was twenty-five minutes past seven. Four hours since they had learned Colin was missing. Longer since he had been taken. Less than five days until Carevalo’s Saturday-night deadline.

  Blanca was looking past Mélanie at Charles. “I may only have been fifteen. But I gave you my word. I do not go back on my word.”

  “I know, Blanca.” Charles gave her one of his smiles that were as warm as a cashmere shawl and as fortifying as a glass of whisky. “But we’ve had to question all our assumptions about the people we know. I thought I knew Carevalo. I couldn’t have been more disastrously mistaken.”

  Mélanie returned to the settee, and Blanca moved back to the sofa.

  “Sir?” Addison was standing beside the sofa. He had been sitting next to Blanca but had punctiliously risen to his feet when she did. “Don’t you want to ask if I took it?”

  “You’re a remarkable man, Addison, but slipping out of the clearing and dodging through the trees with a broken leg seems beyond even your capabilities.”

  “I could have been pretending about the broken leg.”

  “So you could. Were you?”

  “No,” said Addison, in precisely the same tone. “And I didn’t take the ring. Though I was probably the only one of the party who knew we were in the mountains to fetch it.”

  “There was speculation among the soldiers?” Charles asked.

  “Constantly. The odds-on favorite theory was that you were delivering the gold to support a surprise attack on the French garrison at Palencia. But there
was also some talk about funneling the gold to British agents, and a rather ingenious theory that the bandits were blackmailing either Wellington or the ambassador over an amorous intrigue. I don’t think the lieutenant believed any of the stories.”

  “Jennings?” Charles perched on the arm of the settee and rested his hand on Mélanie’s shoulder. His fingers were as cold and tense as she felt inside. “Why not?”

  Addison seated himself on the sofa again, carefully smoothing the creases from his trousers. Unlike Blanca, whose hair was only half pinned up and whose gown wasn’t buttoned properly, he looked as immaculate as ever, his linen spotless, his pale hair combed smooth, his pearl-gray coat without a wrinkle. “Jennings kept himself aloof from the men,” he said at last. “Well, he would, he was an officer. But I’d catch him watching you sometimes, sir, with an odd look in his eyes. If I had to put a name to it, I’d call it calculating.”

  “Jennings asked me outright about the reasons for the mission,” Charles said, “though I don’t think he really expected an answer. He didn’t care much for having to play nursemaid to a civilian.”

  “Jennings was a clumsy oaf.” Blanca leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and scowled at the shiny black toes of her shoes. “Oh, his face was nice enough and the rest of him wasn’t bad, either, but he was too quick and he didn’t have the least idea what to do with his hands.”

  Addison swung his head round to stare at Blanca. “Good God,” he said after a moment. “Do you mean you let Jennings—”

  Blanca straightened up and shrugged, though she avoided meeting Addison’s gaze. “I told you he had a nice face. And you were refusing to so much as touch my hand.”

  “But you’d just been—” Addison swallowed. His face was even more bloodless than usual.

  Blanca flushed. “That was war.” She lifted her chin and looked him straight in the eye. “I wanted pleasure to erase it.”

  Their gazes locked. It was Addison who looked away, his own cheeks stained with color. Under normal circumstances, he and Blanca kept up a scrupulous pretense of being no more than friends when Charles and Mélanie were present.