Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  Her words grated on his nerves like nails on a schoolroom slate. “Believing you does not come easily at present, madam.”

  She turned her head to look him full in the face. “Blanca was a fourteen-year-old orphan when I met her, Charles. Raoul and I rescued her from her uncle’s filthy tavern where she had to fight off her uncle’s blows and the wandering hands of the customers. She would have done anything for me after we took her away from there. Lay the blame for the deception where it belongs. At my door.”

  “Damn you, there’s blame enough to go round.” Nausea gripped him for a moment, like a vise. He looked at his wife. She was as familiar to him as the salt breeze off the Perthshire coast or the smell of snuff and the crack of walnuts from the back benches in the House of Commons. And at the same time, she was as much a stranger as Helen Trevennen. “How old were you?”

  “How old was I when?”

  “When you went to work for O’Roarke.” He ran his fingers through his hair. He had laid himself open to her in an intimate detail it seared him to remember, yet he did not know even the simplest facts of her life. “Christ, how old are you now?”

  “Six-and-twenty. My birthday is the sixth of October. Raoul taught me it’s best to stick to the truth when you can.”

  O’Roarke’s name was like salt poured on a raw wound. He wanted to hurt her with a savageness he could scarcely recognize in himself. “I’m surprised you can even remember the truth. Am I supposed to feel less a fool because I’ve been presenting you with jewel boxes on the correct date every year? How old were you when O’Roarke found you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “A year after your father died.”

  “Yes.”

  Charles looked at her for a moment. He’d been constructing defenses for too long not to recognize them in others. Mélanie would answer questions about working in a brothel, about being a spy and betraying her marriage vows, but she shied away from any mention of her father’s death.

  He wanted to batter her defenses and force her to confront whatever she was hiding from, because that might inflict on her some fraction of the pain she’d inflicted on him. He wanted to ask more about her father, because with the part of his brain that could still think at all, he wanted to understand her.

  But he said nothing. Perhaps he did not press her out of his old habit of not pushing past the boundaries she set. Or perhaps his childhood hurts were still too raw for him to force her to speak of her own, whatever else she had done.

  They pulled up in front of the Thistle, and Randall ran into the tavern to deliver Charles’s message. Mélanie turned her face to the window. “Charles, what do you think was in the letter from Lieutenant Jennings? Jennings wouldn’t have known he was going to die when he wrote it. He wasn’t planning to send the ring with it. He was probably just using the letter as a temporary hiding place until he gave the ring to the bandits to sell to you.”

  Charles stared at the bland emptiness of the carriage seat opposite. “Romantic drivel. Erotic imaginings. He could even have written to her about his swindle with the ring, though I doubt he’d have been stupid enough to put it down in writing. And if Miss Trevennen knew what the ring was, she’d have been a fool not to try to sell it to the British government.”

  “So what was she afraid of? Was Jennings protecting her from something, so that once he was gone she had to run?”

  “Jennings didn’t strike me as much of a protector.” Charles folded his arms across his chest. “She could have been lying about being afraid. I get the feeling Miss Trevennen lied with great agility.”

  “Yes.” Mélanie put the grimy fingertips of her gloves up to her temples. “Considering how like me she seems to have been, one would think I’d understand her better.”

  Charles shot a quick look at her. She sounded serious, not self-mocking, and her dark brows were drawn in concentration. “Perhaps she was running off with a wealthy lover,” he said. “That would explain why she told Violet Goddard she’d made her fortune and her life had changed.”

  “Jennings’s death freed her to go off with this other man? That assumes she took her loyalty to Jennings seriously.”

  “Some women do,” Charles said.

  Mélanie jerked as though he’d struck her. “Very true,” she said. “But that doesn’t explain the secrecy surrounding her disappearance.”

  Charles scanned her face, looking for something he couldn’t have defined and wouldn’t have believed if he’d found it. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t.”

  Randall swung back onto the box and gave the horses their office. Mélanie fell silent as they wended their way through the London streets. They often sat thus, on their way to a rout or a reception or an evening at the theater or on an expedition to buy books for the children or attend a public meeting or see the latest Royal Academy Exhibition at Somerset House. Her profile looked as it always did, outlined against the green silk that covered the carriage walls. He would have recognized the angle of her head in the shadows of twilight. He would have known the elusive scent of her skin in cloaking darkness. How could her outward person be the same, when everything about her was false? How, through seven years of marriage, could he have been such an utter fool as never to have guessed the truth of what she was? He had an unexpected memory of one of the rare, perfect days he had spent with his mother. He must have been about ten, because it was before his sister was born. His mother had taken him and his brother riding along the Perthshire coast, and they’d picnicked on the beach. While his brother built a sand castle, his mother had pulled out a notebook and taught Charles the key to an ingenious cipher. That night she’d eaten supper with them in the nursery and tucked them into bed. He could still remember her promising them another such day tomorrow as he drifted off to sleep. But when they woke in the morning, she’d already packed her bags and left for London. They hadn’t seen her again for three months.

  He’d long since accepted that he hadn’t known his mother. He would never know what had finally driven her to take her life, if she had thought of her children in those last moments or if he and his brother and sister had been as tangential to her then as they had the rest of the time.

  He certainly hadn’t known his father. He would never know if Kenneth Fraser had accepted him as his heir out of duty or uncertainty. He would never know who actually had fathered him, in the crudest sense of the word.

  He thought, with the stab of guilt her memory always brought, of his first love, Kitty. God knows he hadn’t understood her or he wouldn’t have failed her so badly. It was too late now to understand his parents or Kitty. In recent years, he had begun to realize that he might never know what had gone wrong between him and his brother, either.

  But he would have sworn he knew Mélanie to the core.

  The sharp smell of the river seeped into the carriage. Mélanie broke the silence as they rattled across the dilapidated stones of London Bridge toward Southwark. Her voice was unusually husky. “Will we have trouble getting into the Marshalsea?”

  Charles tore his gaze from the broad, greasy expanse of the Thames, thick with barges and lighters and skiffs. “They lock the gates at night, but there’s no trouble getting in during the day. My classics tutor at Oxford spent a year there. He was a brilliant man with a weakness for cards and not a lot of skill to go with it. I visited him in prison several times.”

  “I remember. You told me about him when you proposed the bill to change the debt laws.”

  Another image flickered across his memory. Sitting at his desk in the early hours of the morning with a dull pain in his head and a scribbled-over paper before him. Mélanie bringing him coffee, perching on the edge of his desk, reading the speech, suggesting changes…

  He stared at her. Betrayal wasn’t a single blow, but a series of sword cuts, each one uniquely painful. “You helped me with that speech. Not to mention God knows how many others. I let a foreign agent pen the words I spoke in the House of Commons. I suppose that ought to be funny. I
suppose you thought it was funny.”

  She turned to him with a sharp twist of her head. “Charles, whatever else you think of me, you must realize I believe in the same things you do. The freedom to speak and write what one believes. A legal system that doesn’t throw people in prison without charge. A life in which children don’t starve on the streets or die in workhouses or lose their limbs in factories. A say in one’s own government.”

  “Liberty, equality, and fraternity?”

  “In a nutshell.”

  “Your Napoleon Bonaparte changed the French republic into an empire long before he lost at Waterloo.”

  “I’d be the last to call Napoleon a saint or even a hero,” Mélanie said. “Perhaps he betrayed the revolution and trampled on its ideals. Perhaps we all did. But I’d take what Napoleon did for France and Spain over what’s come after any day.”

  “And that justifies everything you did?”

  “What do you want me to say? That my belief in a tarnished ideal gave me the right to lie to you and betray you at every turn? That I see now that I was wrong, that I should have fought fairly when we both know war isn’t fair? That I turned my back on everything I believed in the moment I realized I loved you? None of those answers would be true.”

  “Least of all that you love me.” Anger welled up on his tongue like fresh blood. “There’ve been enough lies between us already, Mel.”

  “‘Doubt truth to be a liar; But—’” She shook her head. “I don’t expect you to believe me. I wouldn’t believe it, were our situations reversed. But I do love you, Charles. I always will.”

  He returned her gaze, barricading himself against the plea in her eyes. “God,” he said, sick with her, sick with himself for wanting to believe her, “you just don’t let up, do you?”

  Chapter 12

  C harles sprang down from the carriage in front of the Marshalsea prison and offered his hand to Mélanie. Chivalry or force of habit, he supposed. He released her as soon as she’d descended the carriage steps.

  They were a world away from the decorous precincts of Mayfair or even the familiar chaos of Covent Garden. The air smelled of sour rot and the stench of refuse from the laystalls that overflowed the street. Windows were cracked or boarded over or missing entirely. Coal porters and dustmen, barefoot children, and men and women in shapeless, water-stained garments, who looked as though they scavenged on the river, pushed their way along the crowded street. Carriages clattered by, windows and doors securely locked.

  The gray brick walls of the prison reared up before them, stolid, uncompromising, unrelenting. Charles surveyed the prison gates, shutting his mind to the fact that if Helen Trevennen’s uncle could give them no clue to her whereabouts, they might have reached a dead end.

  As he and Mélanie crossed the pavement to the prison, a boy of no more than seven caught at the skirt of his greatcoat. Charles stared into the boy’s saucerlike eyes, thought of his son, and pressed some coins into the lad’s hand.

  The sky had clouded over again, adding to the gloom of the place, but the porter who admitted them at the main gate was cheerful enough. He nodded at the mention of Mr. Trevennen, gave them a set of directions that sounded like the key to a maze, and said he was sure the old gentleman would be glad of company.

  The Marshalsea was like a small, walled city. They made their way along grimy cobblestoned alleys, between high, smoke-stained brick buildings that might have passed for lodging houses if one forgot about the locked gates. A group of children were playing blindman’s buff in the wider space where two alleys intersected. A woman was taking her laundry down, one eye on the darkening sky. A terrier nosed round the garbage by the steps of one of the buildings. The sound of an ill-tuned spinet came through an open casement window, the hiss of a fire through another, voices raised in argument through a third.

  Many people spent the better part of their lives here. You couldn’t get out of debtors’ prison until you paid off your debts and you couldn’t earn any money to pay off your debts while you were locked up. Yet another example of the profound wisdom of the British system of justice. The same system under which, until a mere five years ago, a parent could legally sell a child to be a climbing boy or a pickpocket or a prostitute. The only crime had been the sale not of the child but of the child’s clothes.

  Trevennen’s rooms were on the first floor, through a decaying wooden archway, up a sagging staircase, down a long gallery that was open on one side. Charles knocked on the splintery door. Heavy, ponderous footsteps sounded within, and the door opened.

  Pale blue eyes surveyed them out of a broad, strong-boned face. “Yes? How may I help you? I don’t believe I’ve—” The blue gaze slid past Charles and fastened on Mélanie. “Good Lord.” The eyes widened. The shoulders straightened. The voice deepened with the resonance of a cello. “‘’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white/Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on.’”

  Mélanie had been looking ill a moment before, but she gave a laugh that had the sparkle of fine champagne. “How very flattering. I can’t answer for the Countess Olivia, but I fear in my case nature gets assistance from a shocking amount of paint and lotions.”

  A look of pure delight crossed Hugo Trevennen’s face. “A beauty and versed in Shakespeare.” He peered at Mélanie down the bridge of his aquiline nose. “Do I know you, my dear? Appalling that I could have forgotten such a face, but living in this place does strange things to the memory.”

  Mélanie gave him a smile that was a perfect combination of the daughterly and the flirtatious. Charles watched Trevennen melt like candle wax beneath its warmth. “No, we haven’t met. I’m Mélanie Fraser and this is my husband, Charles. We’d be very much obliged if we could have a word with you. It’s about your niece, Helen.”

  Trevennen’s brows shot up. “My word. Nelly. Yes, of course. Delighted to be of help—if I can.” He smoothed his coat. The coat was threadbare and cut in a frocked style that was thirty years out of date, but the fabric was expensive and the frayed shirt beneath was spotless and carefully starched. “Do come in.”

  He ushered them into a small, low-ceilinged room. Theatrical prints hung on the peeling wallpaper, and racing forms were stacked on the tabletop. The carpet looked like a Turkey rug but on closer inspection was painted canvas. Two high-backed chairs of a cheap pine painted to resemble walnut might have once graced the set of a Shakespearean drama. Charles suspected the painted screen in one corner had come from a production of The School for Scandal.

  Trevennen waved them to the chairs. “Would you care for refreshment?” He swept his arm toward the tarnished brass kettle that hung from a hook over the fireplace, as though he were Prospero and could conjure crystal decanters and plates of cold salmon.

  Mélanie sank onto one of the Shakespearean chairs. “Please don’t trouble yourself.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t entertain much these days.” Trevennen scooped some coal from the coal scuttle and threw it on the fire. “When I think of the supper parties we used to have after a performance…But I fear my large style agreed not with the leanness of my purse.”

  Charles sat in the other high-backed chair. “We understand Miss Trevennen inherited her acting talent from you.”

  “You could say that.” Trevennen sank into an armchair, flicking back the skirts of his coat as if it was a sweeping cloak. “My Hamlet was considered quite good. In the provinces, you know. Of course, by the time I came to London, I played supporting roles. Quite a collection of Shakespearean dukes, and Hazlitt was pleased to comment on my Jaques. ‘And so, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,/And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,/And thereby hangs a tale.’” He frowned, as though this cut a bit too close to the bone. “Oh, you wanted to talk about Helen, didn’t you? What’s she been up to, then?”

  Charles recited the story about Jennings and the legacy left to Helen Trevennen.

  Trevennen listened with the detached interest of an actor hearing the plot of an amusing new pl
ay. Perhaps after so many years in the Marshalsea, everything in the outside world seemed like theatrical illusion. “Nelly. Such a pretty little girl. A wheedler from the first, mind, but even then ‘custom could not stale her infinite variety.’”

  “When did you see her last?” Charles asked.

  Trevennen stared out the window. The iron spikes on the outer wall of the prison were visible through the mildew-filmed glass. “Must be seven or eight years ago. She was never one for regular visits, but she used to appear every so often, usually when she wanted some sort of advice about the theater or racing. She was almost as fond of the horses as I am, though a bit less prodigal. I helped her get her position at the Drury Lane. She made a charmingly innocent Hero and I heard she did a very fetching Constance Neville in her last season. I wasn’t able to attend the performances by that time, of course. Still, I quite looked forward to her carrying on the family name. Then one day this friend of hers—charming young lady—called to say Helen had been obliged to leave London. Do you know where she took herself off to, then?”

  “No,” Charles said. “We were hoping you would know, or at least have some idea.”

  Trevennen blinked. “Sorry, dear boy. Always fancied myself a fair judge of women, but never could predict what Nelly would do from one moment to the next. She drove my poor brother to distraction.”

  “Is your brother still living, Mr. Trevennen?” Mélanie asked.

  “No, Theodore went to his maker some ten years since. He was a parson with a living in Cornwall, near Truro. Lost his wife early and hadn’t the least idea how to bring up the girls, poor fellow. He was a dreadful puritan, which only served to make them more wild, if you ask me, but of course he never did.”

  Charles seized hold of the new information in this speech. “Girls?” he said.

  “Nelly and Susy. You haven’t met Susan? No, no reason you should, I suppose.” Trevennen smoothed his gray-brown hair back from his high forehead, less Prospero now than Falstaff, looking back with rueful regret. “She’s two years younger than Helen. Looks quite like her, though Nelly’s a blonde and Susy got her mother’s red hair. Nelly ran off to London when she was seventeen. Susy followed a year later. My brother washed his hands of the pair of them. Never saw them again as far as I know. But he’d stopped speaking to me to all intents and purposes when I took to the stage. It was quite a surprise when Helen appeared on my doorstep and said she wanted to tread the boards herself. Tried to do what was best for her.”