Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  “I’m sorry.” Edgar raked his fingers through his hair. “I’d give my right arm—You know that, don’t you? Why didn’t you send word to me when it first happened?”

  “We haven’t stopped to breathe, let alone tell anyone. Besides, your links to the government would have put you in an awkward position. I don’t think Castlereagh and others would be too sanguine at the prospect of putting the ring into Carevalo’s hands.”

  Edgar’s eyes widened. “Charles, do you seriously think anyone in the government would put political considerations before a child’s safety?”

  Charles returned his brother’s gaze. “Without a doubt.”

  Edgar stared at him for a moment. “Do you think I would?”

  Charles studied his brother. However strained their own relationship had become in the years since their mother’s death, there was no doubting Edgar’s love for his nephew and niece. “No. Of course not. But there was no need to put you in the middle of the dilemma.”

  “No need.” Edgar dragged his gaze away from Charles and took a long swallow from his mug. “Oh, all right, I won’t argue with you. But I’m in the middle of it now. I’ll do whatever I can, that goes without saying. Tell me how I can help.”

  “Thank you,” Charles said. “But I think it would be best if you—”

  “For God’s sake, Charles, I know you pride yourself on never needing anyone’s assistance, but you can’t afford a misstep here. I love Colin like he’s my own. Unless Lydia’s and my marriage changes in more ways than one, Colin’s the closest to a son I’m ever likely to have.” Edgar slammed both his hands down on the table. “Let me help.”

  The last three words were a plea. For a moment, Mélanie was gone and the Fraser brothers were locked in a silent confrontation across the scarred table. It was an odd sort of intimacy, an intimacy that they had not shared in years. In their childhood, each had been the central person in the other’s world, allies against their father’s coldness, their mother’s bouts of giddiness and depression, their tutor’s strictures. Their sister hadn’t been born until Charles was almost eleven and Edgar nine. In the wilds of Perthshire, the Fraser brothers had had few companions but each other.

  That had changed when they went to Harrow. Charles had still preferred the company of his books, but Edgar had quickly become the center of a circle of friends. Yet though their interests diverged, they had remained close. Until the December when Charles was nineteen and staying late at Oxford to finish an essay on David Hume, while Edgar went back to Perthshire by himself. The December Edgar saw their mother put a bullet through her brain a week before Christmas.

  It was Edgar who had drawn away then, but now his eyes were pleading for the opposite. And he was right. They needed every scrap of help they could get. “Mélanie and I would be grateful for any assistance you can give us,” Charles said.

  Edgar’s shoulders relaxed beneath the smooth blue fabric of his coat. “Thank you.” He turned to Mélanie. “Shouldn’t you see a doctor?”

  “No.”

  “She wouldn’t go, and there isn’t time anyway.” Charles took Mélanie’s wrist between his fingers for a moment. “Still no fever, despite the drenching. You aren’t chilled?”

  She removed her wrist from his grasp. “Charles, you seem to be forgetting I’ve given birth to two children. This is a minor nuisance in comparison.”

  Her dry voice didn’t convince Charles, but it seemed to reassure Edgar, which perhaps was what she’d intended. “What’s the next step?” Edgar asked.

  “A visit to Susan Trevennen,” Charles said.

  “I thought you said the sisters were estranged.”

  “But they were close once. If I disappeared from London, wouldn’t you have a fair idea of where to look for me?”

  Edgar’s eyes narrowed. “Yes, I expect I would,” he said, making no comment on the reference to estrangement. “And if she hasn’t heard from Helen, either?” he asked after a moment.

  Charles fished some coins from his pocket to pay their reckoning. “There’s always Mrs. Jennings. But I don’t want to waste time traveling to Surrey while we have possible leads in London.” He tossed the coins onto the table. “You could be of help there, Edgar.”

  “You want me to go to Surrey to see her while you look for the sister? It’s a bit late to leave tonight, but I’d be happy to do so if you think it would help.”

  Charles glanced at Mélanie. She shook her head. “Better to set off in the morning if you need to go at all,” she said. “But you could go back to Berkeley Square and see if Addison and Blanca have discovered anything.”

  “Of course.” Edgar rubbed his hand across his eyes. “God. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. You realize that, don’t you? What if it can’t—”

  He trailed off under the combined pressure of Charles’s and Mélanie’s gazes. “It can be done,” Mélanie said, “because there’s no alternative. One step at a time, Edgar. That’s the only way we’ll manage.”

  Edgar swallowed. “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  Charles got to his feet and held out his hand to Mélanie. “Wait for us in Berkeley Square, Edgar.”

  “Yes, all right.” Edgar stared at him as though the full implications of his words had just sunk in. “Charles, you can’t take Mélanie to the Gilded Lily.”

  “Dear Edgar,” Mélanie said. “He’s not taking me. I’m going with him.”

  Edgar tugged at his cravat. “Mélanie, I don’t think you understand—”

  “It’s a brothel, Edgar. I understand very well. They’ll just think Charles and I are there for an assignation. It’s amazing the places women of fashion go.”

  Edgar stared at her as though he would be more shocked if he could take in the full import of what she was saying. “Suppose”—he coughed—“suppose you meet someone you know?”

  Mélanie picked her gloves up from the bench and tugged them on. “Then I suspect they’ll be more surprised than we are.”

  They threaded their way through the tables and the rain-spattered customers, collected their outer garments, and walked to the door. “Go to the right,” Charles told his brother. “Take the second hackney that stops. Yes, I know it didn’t manage to shake you off, but it may work with Iago Lorano or his hirelings.”

  Edgar shot Charles a look of concern as they parted. Charles ignored it. Edgar was extremely fond of Mélanie, but like most people, he was deceived by the polished, decorous veneer. Charles had thought he himself was one of the few people who understood her. While her vulnerability had roused his protective instincts, it was her sheer guts he’d fallen in love with. The irony, of course, was that he’d been more deceived by her than anyone.

  He and Mélanie turned left outside the coffeehouse, rounded the corner back into Bow Street, and followed the same process of taking the second hackney.

  “I’m glad you didn’t refuse Edgar’s help,” Mélanie said when they were settled inside the hackney. “We can use it.”

  “Yes, Edgar can be quite handy at fighting dragons. As long as we make sure he attacks the right ones.”

  She shot him a glance. “He’s more straightforward than you, but he’s not a fool.”

  “I never said he was.”

  “And he loves Colin.” She rested her head against the worn squabs. “I remember when I first met him. It was just after I came to Lisbon, before we were betrothed. Some sort of embassy party—he looked very dashing in his dress uniform. You’d retreated to the library in one of your black moods. I told Edgar I was worried about you. He said it was only to be expected, considering all the men you’d lost on the trip into the mountains. I said I didn’t see why, you couldn’t have known about the ambush, and it was a miracle you’d got the survivors home in one piece. Edgar told me that just because you preferred to have your nose in a book, I shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking you didn’t care about people. Then he said”—she turned her head against the squabs to look at him in the gathering darkness within the h
ackney—“‘My brother decided years ago that the world is his responsibility. Every so often it proves a bit much even for him. He takes these lapses very hard.’”

  Charles stared at a patch of damp on the hackney window. “Edgar’s no fool, but I’ve never considered him a particularly good judge of character. Nor have you, if memory serves.”

  “No, but he has remarkably keen flashes of insight,” Mélanie said. He could feel her gaze on the back of his head. “I don’t know what happened between you, Charles. I don’t need to know. But Edgar doesn’t just love Colin. He loves you.”

  Charles swung his head round. “Damn it, Mel, you may be far more skilled at deception than I am, but I think I’m still a better judge of my own family.”

  She watched him with those damnably all-seeing eyes. “Darling, you’ve every right to push me away, but I hate to see you push everyone else away as well.”

  “Whatever the problems between my brother and me, they go back for years. As I recall, you and I were on remarkably intimate terms until this morning.”

  “Yes. But—No, I’m sorry, I’m being just the sort of meddling wife I loathe.”

  “Thank you.” He folded his arms across his chest. “For once we’re in agreement. As I thought we’d agreed that until we recover our son nothing else is of any moment.”

  He heard Mélanie’s intake of breath. When she spoke her voice was tight with fear, but she merely said, “That goes without saying.”

  The hackney rattled on. Charles crossed his legs. The strong coffee and rough brandy, swallowed after a day with little food, had left a dull pain behind his temples and a nervous energy that thrummed through his veins. He glanced down at his hands, always the first part of his body to betray him. Even in the murky light, he noted a telltale tremor. Damnation.

  “How much should we worry about Castlereagh?” Mélanie said.

  Charles clasped his hands together. “We’re safe for the moment. He thinks he has Edgar following us. He won’t put anyone else on the matter.”

  Mélanie gnawed on her finger. “I’m surprised Castlereagh called Edgar in. I thought he had his own agents in London. Not as many as the Home Secretary, of course, but he used to have quite a tidy little network in England as well as abroad. I suppose it’s closed down a good deal since the war.”

  The reality of what she had been, what she had done, what they had both done, hit Charles again like a punch to the gut. For a moment his brain was choked with images, fragments, heedless confidences, nighttime whispers, unthinking, unforgivable betrayals. How many of his friends had lost their lives because of his carelessness? How many people who thought they could trust him had been betrayed because he was so foolish as to trust his wife?

  He thought of his friend Fitzroy Somerset, Wellington’s military secretary, who had lost his right arm at Waterloo. He thought of the innkeeper near Salamanca who’d passed messages for him until the man was discovered by the French and shot. And then, unexpectedly, he thought of the family of afrancesados, French sympathizers, who’d sheltered him and dressed his wounds after he’d been caught in a skirmish. He’d told the family he was a French officer out of uniform, carrying dispatches to his commander. They’d believed him without question. The elder daughter was being courted by a French soldier, and by the time Charles left he’d learned some very interesting details about French troop deployment in the area.

  He could still smell the scent of the hay in the barn where he’d slept and taste the fresh goat’s milk the eight-year-old son of the family brought him to drink. He could still see the boy’s bright, eager eyes as he knelt on Charles’s pallet and drank in Charles’s lies about life in the French army.

  Mélanie’s accusations about his intelligence work echoed in his head. In truth, he could not deny that his work had gone well beyond fetching and carrying. It had begun because he was good at ciphers, but before long he’d been asked to retrieve coded documents as well as decipher them. An odd collection of talents—a skill at playacting, a facility for languages, the ability to pick a lock and talk himself out of just about any situation—had drawn him deeper into the intelligence web.

  But whatever paltry deceptions he had engaged in, whatever twinges of guilt he had felt, surely his own lies could not compare with what Mélanie had done. Surely deceiving strangers on the opposite side in wartime was different from deceiving the person with whom you shared your bed and body, your work and the raising of your children and the innermost recesses of your life.

  He stared at his distorted reflection in the square of glass that was the hackney window. In the street beyond, a lamplighter on a ladder was battling the rain in an effort to light the oil in the blackened globe of a street lamp. The flame sputtered, puffed, and went out. “We can’t risk letting Edgar know about your past,” Charles said.

  “No.” Mélanie’s voice sounded firmer than it had. “Edgar’s definitely an Othello.”

  “What? Oh, I see.” He remembered their conversation when they returned from the party at the Esterhazys’—another world in which they had loved and trusted each other and been deluded enough to think they could keep their children safe. “‘And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.’”

  “You know how I adore Edgar, but he does rather tend to see everything in extremes of good and bad. He’s just the sort who would snap and turn violent if he learned his wife had betrayed him.”

  “If Edgar learned Lydia was a French spy, he’d probably drop dead of shock,” Charles said. “I think I might as well. Espionage would be bound to violate her sense of decorum.”

  “Poor Lydia. I sometimes think her problem is boredom as much as anything. They’d both be so much happier if—”

  She bit back the words. Charles said it for her. “If they had children.”

  “Yes.”

  Colin was a tangible presence in the carriage, so close Charles almost imagined he could hear his son’s laugh or see the dark gleam of his hair. “Edgar would be a good father,” Charles said.

  “Yes. And Lydia might take to motherhood. Perhaps—It takes some couples years to conceive a child. I said as much to Lydia only last month. Of course, it would help if she and Edgar were actually sleeping together, and though she’d never discuss such things, I rather fear they stopped sharing a bed some time ago.”

  “So do I.” Charles had more than once marveled at the difference between his own marriage, born of exigency, and the passionless union that had resulted from his brother’s love match. Any such comparison had the bite of irony now, though whatever else could be said of his marriage to Mélanie, it could not be called passionless.

  The silence was punctuated by the familiar rustle of Mélanie plucking at the skirt of her pelisse. After a moment she said, “Have you ever been to the Gilded Lily?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Mel. I’ve been a married man since I came back to Britain.” In fact, his experience of brothels was limited to one visit in his Oxford days, which he had spent cooling his heels in the sitting room. Intimacy was difficult enough for him. He could never bring himself to pay for the substitute. But he was not about to go into that with the woman seated beside him, the woman with whom he had shared such intimacy that she almost might have coined him and from whom he had received nothing but lies in return.

  “Then it’s a lucky thing I have some experience to go on.” Mélanie’s voice was bright as cut glass. “Some brothels have a staff of girls to service clients. Some merely provide rooms to be used by courtesans and actresses, and even respectable married women who wish to meet their lovers. Some do both. I imagine the Gilded Lily is that sort. I shouldn’t think it likely we’ll meet any of your friends there, but some of the most discriminating gentlemen find a certain piquancy in going slumming. Or so I’ve been given to understand.”

  Her words brought the rest of her morning’s revelations back to him. In the deluge of events, the fact that she had once been employed in a brothel had been swept aside as almost insignificant.
Now he turned it over in his mind, another piece of the puzzle of the woman he had married.

  The bits of information he’d gleaned during the day shifted in his head. She would have been an orphan of sixteen when Raoul O’Roarke found her in the brothel. Charles had always known she’d endured horrors before they met. What had happened to her in the brothel was probably not so very different from what he had thought she’d suffered at the hands of the French soldiers and Spanish bandits.

  He stared at her, trying to see beyond the lies. “Mel—”

  “What, Charles?”

  What indeed? If the memories are too painful, don’t come with me? She’d laugh, and he needed her help. Tell me the whole of your past? It wasn’t the time.

  She undid her pelisse at the throat and tugged off the muslin tippet at the neck of her gown. “No one will trust us if we look too fine.” She unbuttoned her gloves, then slipped off her wedding band and put it in her reticule along with the tippet.

  His throat tightened with a pang that might have been anger or loss or self-loathing. He’d only seen her remove that circle of gold a handful of times since he’d placed it on her finger. He looked at her face, the sweetness about the mouth, the fresh purity in the curve of the bones. Most men of his acquaintance would be horrified by the revelation that their wives had a past, let alone that they had sold their bodies anywhere but on the Marriage Mart (save for one or two who had actually married courtesans, but that was another matter).

  Charles had always claimed that whose bed a woman had shared before her marriage was no more a man’s business than it was a wife’s business to ask the same about her husband. He recalled arguing as much in an after-dinner discussion fueled by plentiful port. “It’s all very well to try to outrage us with your bohemian sensibilities, Fraser,” one of the other men present had said, staggering to the sideboard, where their host kept a chamber pot. “You’d feel differently if it was your own wife we were talking about.” And then everyone had laughed, because they all knew Mélanie and they thought Charles was the last husband in London who had to worry about his wife before or after their marriage.