Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  It was always a challenge to have one’s principles put to the test. With a detached part of his mind—a safe corner he retreated into all too often—Charles was relieved to find that he didn’t feel differently when it was his own wife involved. Mélanie had never questioned his sexual past. He had no right to question hers. That she had no doubt slept with O’Roarke, not to mention God knew whom else, after their marriage was another matter entirely.

  The bite of jealousy on his tongue was as unfamiliar as a draught of Blue Ruin after years of the smoothest whisky. Mélanie might tease him for his naïveté, but he knew the games many of their friends indulged in. He’d more than once wandered onto the terrace during a ball to hear a cry or a soft murmur from the shrubbery. Or stepped into a darkened antechamber only to have to withdraw with an averted gaze and a muttered apology. At those same entertainments he’d watched his wife glide about the room in a whisper of velvet, a rustle of silk, a stir of dark ringlets, exerting her charms with disarming insouciance and devastating accuracy. He’d been idiotically sure of her. What they had between them was too rich, too complex, too multilayered for her to risk it for transitory pleasure, any more than he would. Or so he had thought. But now he faced the fact that what he and Mélanie had was built on lies, while she and O’Roarke shared a past that was every bit as textured and complex as what he once thought they had had between them.

  The memory of their wedding night thundered in his head. Every moment of it was etched in his memory. She’d looked at him with such perfect trust. Or so it had seemed. It had all been lies, that wordless vocabulary of touch they had constructed between them. Christ, she must have been laughing at him inwardly. Perhaps she had laughed about it later. Perhaps she’d told O’Roarke—

  He slammed his fist into the leather of the carriage seat. Damn her. She had tricked him into doing the one thing he had strenuously avoided since childhood. Baring his soul.

  It was still raining when they pulled up in Villiers Street. Through the rain-streaked window Charles saw a faded sign, swinging wildly in the wind, bearing a painting of a lily in peeling gilt and beneath it a picture of a coffeepot, held in a beringed, lace-cuffed hand. He might not be experienced in such matters, but he knew the latter indicated a coffeehouse that doubled as a brothel.

  The smell of damp and rot was thick in the air. He considered asking the hackney driver to wait for them but decided against it. It might draw undue attention, and in any case he wasn’t sure the driver would comply. He handed his wife from the hackney and followed her into a piece of her past.

  Chapter 16

  T he smell hit Mélanie like a fist in the face as she stepped over the threshold. Tobacco and sweat, cheap scent and cheaper liquor. And a sweet, cloying muskiness, a never-forgotten odor that took her back to hot hands and probing fingers, coarse linen sheets and groaning straw-filled mattresses and soul-destroying despair.

  The tin lamps swayed with the opening of the door. The light jumped and wavered over the peeling walls, the stained tables, the rouged, sweating faces, lending a hellish aspect to an already hellish scene. She forced herself to note her surroundings, to anchor herself to the present. Smoke-blackened walls, floorboards that didn’t appear to have been swept in a fortnight, bright, gaudy dresses, brightly colored hair. Her own hair had been hennaed once, until one of the older women had pointed out that her natural coloring was more dramatic.

  She turned to Charles and pressed her face into his shoulder. “Put your arm round me,” she whispered against his collar. “We need to look as though we belong.”

  He hesitated only a fraction of a second before he draped his arm across her shoulders. She leaned into him, not with wifely, shoulder-brushing intimacy, but with a blatant, clinging sensuality.

  Most of the customers were too absorbed in bottles, dice, and partners to take much notice of them, but as they moved past the brick fireplace, a hand shot out and gripped her skirt. “Here now, you’re new.” The speaker had an Oxbridge accent, and judging by his pimply face and squeaky voice, he was still at university. He ran a far from inexperienced gaze over her. Then he glanced at Charles. “Wouldn’t mind having a turn when you’re done with her, old boy.”

  The muscles in Charles’s arm tightened. “Watch your tongue, lad. You’ll never win a lady by talking behind her back.”

  He drew her away, but she turned back and ran her finger down the side of the boy’s face. His skin was slick with oily sweat. “Sorry, love.” She made her voice lower, rougher, throatier than usual, without a trace of a Continental accent. “He’s got a hellish temper. Maybe some other time.”

  Charles steered her to a table in an alcove by the fire. She removed her bonnet and pulled some tendrils of hair loose about her face. A tired-looking waiter threaded his way through the tables to their side, surveyed her as though matter-of-factly totting up her monetary value, and asked what he could do for them. Charles ordered brandy, his Scots accent roughening the Mayfair edges out of his voice, and said they were looking for a woman named Susan Trevennen.

  “Trevennen?” The waiter scratched his thin, greasy hair.

  Mélanie leaned one elbow on the table. “She came from Cornwall originally. She’d be about thirty. She has red hair.”

  The waiter’s face cleared. “Oh, you mean Copper Sue. Wait a tick, love, I’ll send her over.”

  Charles looked at Mélanie. “My compliments.”

  “Practice.” She unclasped her pelisse and let it slither down on the chair round her. If she kept her arm at her side, the rent in her gown wasn’t too noticeable. The air felt clammy against her bare throat, though her gown covered far more of her than most of her evening dresses. Two men at a nearby table were staring at her, as was another from across the room. She’d forgotten how it felt to be raked with so blatant a gaze, as though you were stripped down to the sum of your body parts.

  The waiter returned, plunked down two glasses of brandy, and said without embarrassment that Copper Sue was with a customer but would join them presently. Charles picked up the brandy and sniffed it. “Gin might have been safer.”

  “I think any sort of safety is a rare commodity here.” She picked up the brandy and took a long swallow. It ranked several degrees lower than the liquor Charles had given her at the Marshalsea. They’d drunk raw red wine in the brothel in Léon. Sharp, sour, strong enough to blur the sharp edges of reality.

  “Mel.” Charles’s hand moved across the table.

  She looked from his hand into his gray eyes. The compassion in his gaze seared her. She summoned up the hard look she’d perfected at fifteen, when she needed all her defenses. “Don’t worry, darling. It’s not as if there’s much left that can shock me.”

  A couple dropped down at the table next to them. Or rather the man dropped down, pulled the women into his lap, and began whispering a variety of suggestions into her ear in a voice that carried all too well. Crudeness combined with lack of imagination. A fatal mix.

  Mélanie shifted her chair and transferred her gaze to the painting over the fireplace. It was smoke-darkened, but it seemed to depict Zeus, in a swan guise that was all too human, hovering over a recumbent Leda. Leda wore nothing beyond a thin strip of gauze about her waist, and Zeus was the only swan Mélanie had ever seen with an erect phallus.

  Laughter drifted down the stairs, followed by an abrupt cry and the sound of a door being slammed shut. Upstairs there would be thin mattresses and stale sheets and cracked, cobweb-hung expanses of ceiling. And little one could do to control what happened once the door was closed and the money on the table.

  At the center of the room, a woman with bright gold hair and a low-cut red dress started singing a bawdy song that was vaguely recognizable as a variant on “Là ci darem la mano.” The undergraduate who had pawed Mélanie had pulled a fair-haired child who couldn’t be more than fourteen onto his lap and was undoing the strings on her bodice.

  “You wanted to see me?” A hard-eyed woman with hair the color of a coppe
r skillet materialized out of the crowd and stood before their table.

  Charles got to his feet. “Miss Trevennen?”

  She laughed, a sound as harsh as the taste of the Gilded Lily’s brandy. Her teeth were yellow and she was missing two of them. “It’s a long time since anyone’s called me that. Quite a novelty. Yes, that’s me. What do you want?” Her gaze slid from Charles to Mélanie. “I don’t do threesomes.”

  Charles didn’t so much as blink. “It’s about your sister.”

  “Helen?” A spark flashed in Susan Trevennen’s eyes, like the glint of a knife blade. “She hasn’t managed to get herself killed, has she? That’s just about the only good news you could bring me about my bitch of a sister.”

  Susan could only be a few years Mélanie’s senior, but beneath the layers of cheap powder and greasy rouge, her face was splotched and marked by deep furrows. A mark that might be a bruise showed beneath her left eye, but it was her eyes themselves that resonated for Mélanie. The wariness, the instinctive calculation, the knowledge that everyone wanted to use you one way or another and the only way to survive was to use him or her first. Her own eyes, Mélanie knew, had had that same look before her sixteenth birthday. It had taken all Raoul’s training and all his patience in other ways to get rid of it.

  “Your sister isn’t dead, Miss Trevennen,” Charles said. “At least not as far as we know.”

  “Nell always had the most godawful knack for self-preservation.” Susan pushed limp strands of dyed red hair off her face. Beads of sweat had clotted the powder against her skin. “Why did she send you here?”

  “She didn’t send us,” Charles said. “We’re trying to find her.”

  Susan Trevennen gave a bark of dry laughter. “If you’re looking for Nell, I’m the last person you should be talking to.”

  “You’re just about the last person we’ve tried.” Charles pulled out one of the rickety ladderback chairs at the table. “Won’t you sit down, Miss Trevennen?” The Scots accent had faded again. It was his drawing room voice, the sort of voice Susan Trevennen must have been accustomed to as a girl in her father’s vicarage.

  Susan’s eyes widened. She looked from the chair to Charles. “I can’t talk long.” Her gaze slid sideways. “I have customers waiting.”

  Mélanie took a handful of coins from her reticule and laid them on the table. Charles flagged down the waiter and ordered Susan a glass of gin.

  Susan dropped into the chair Charles was holding out. “What do you want with Nell?”

  Mélanie started to launch into the now-familiar story about the legacy, but thought better of it. Susan had no reason to want to help her sister to a fortune. Mélanie looked into Susan’s blue-gray eyes. If she had seen an echo of herself in Helen Trevennen’s sister, perhaps she could make Susan see the same in her. “Our son is in danger,” she said. “And your sister may be able to help.”

  Something flickered in Susan’s gaze. Surprise? Reassessment? Compassion, even? “In that case I’m sorry for you. Nell’s not likely to help unless there’s something in it for her.”

  “That’s the least of our problems.” Charles returned to his chair. “When we find her we’ll make it more than worth her while.”

  Susan’s gaze flickered between them, taking in Mélanie’s ringless left hand. A gentleman and his whore, she’d think. So much the better. While Susan warmed to Charles’s courteous treatment, she’d be more likely to talk to Mélanie if she thought they lived in the same world. “I haven’t seen Nell in years.”

  Mélanie tugged at the neck of her gown. The gin-soaked air cloyed at her senses and made her skin crawl. “You know your sister left London?”

  “I heard she had.” Susan’s own voice had grown more refined, as though she was falling back into the accents of her girlhood. “I hadn’t seen her for some time before that. We quarreled.”

  “Over what?” Mélanie said.

  “A man. What else? Nell always had her pick of men. She didn’t need mine, too. I swear she did it just to be spiteful. Anyway, she didn’t have him for long. He got a knife in his ribs in a brawl over a wager. Which cockroach could run across the table fastest. He always was a mad fool.” An edge of regret flashed beneath the mockery.

  “I’m sorry,” Mélanie said.

  Susan hunched a shoulder. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. He wasn’t worth the heartache.”

  Mélanie rested her elbows on the table in an attitude that invited confidences. “When you first came to London you lived with your sister.”

  “I was more naïve then. About a lot of things.” Susan tugged her spangled scarf closer round her bare shoulders.

  The waiter plunked the gin down on the table. Susan took a long swallow from the chipped glass.

  “Your sister’s friend Violet Goddard told us Helen may have feared some sort of danger when she went away,” Charles said. “Do you have any idea what that might have been?”

  “Not in the least. Nell wasn’t afraid of anything. I suspect she thought she was in trouble and she ran to get out of it. Or else she thought there was money to be made by disappearing.”

  “Where do you think she went?” Charles asked.

  Susan shrugged. The spangled scarf slipped loose, revealing the tattered, lace-edged neck of her gown. A blue-black bruise spread across her collarbone, mottled by a dusting of powder. “Somewhere better than this. Nell has a knack for landing on her feet. And she likes nice things.”

  Charles sat watching her, intensity in his stillness. “Is that what she wanted most out of life? Nice things?”

  “Yes. That is—” Susan picked at a grease spot on the table. Her voice and phrasing had echoes of the vicarage schoolroom. “In some ways I think what Nell wanted was respectability. Which is funny, because that’s what our father wanted for us, and Nell ran away from it. Only she didn’t want to be poor and respectable like Papa. She wanted people’s respect and all the elegancies of life in the bargain. If anyone could manage it, perhaps Nell could. I haven’t managed either one. It’s funny—”

  A fit of coughing seized her, a deep racking sound that came from the chest. She tugged a handkerchief from her bodice and put it over her mouth. “I haven’t always been here, you know,” she said when the coughs subsided. “I was an opera dancer and then I worked at a house in Marylebone. Not one of the grandest in the city, but quite nice. Gilt mirrors and velvet sofas and gentlemen in proper coats and neckcloths.” She glanced about the room. A portly man was walking down the stairs, buttoning up his trousers. A couple were on their way upstairs, undressing each other as they went. “Not that it makes a lot of difference with the candle doused. Still, this wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

  Mélanie took a sip of the harsh brandy. In the past ten years she had known anger and fear and self-hatred. But since Raoul O’Roarke had taken her out of the door of the brothel in Léon she had rarely felt powerless. It was one of the reasons she would be forever grateful to him. “Did Helen ever talk about wanting to live anywhere besides London?” she said. “Did she ever mention starting over in America or the East Indies?”

  “Nell in the wilds of the colonies? Oh no, that’s the last place my sister would go. Paris, perhaps, or Italy.”

  A chorus of whistles carried across the room. A full-figured girl with dark ringlets was perched on the edge of a table, skirt drawn up well above her knees, making an elaborate show of unlacing the ribbons on her slippers. “Amy Graves,” Susan said. “A posture moll. Toast of the Gilded Lily. She makes more money with her performances down here than the rest of us do upstairs. She’s almost young enough to be my daughter.” She turned back to Mélanie. “I wish I could help you. I’m sorry for whatever’s happened to your son. But I don’t have any idea where Nell might have gone.”

  Mélanie leaned forward. “You knew her once. Better than anyone. If she wrote to someone after she left, who might it have been?”

  “Nell didn’t have a soft spot for anyone. She didn’t even tel
l our uncle she was leaving, and she wasn’t talking to me at all by that time.”

  “Yes, but assuming she did write, to just one person, who might that have been?”

  Susan frowned. The whistles from across the room grew louder. Amy Graves had removed her garters and was peeling off her stockings, sheer black silk embroidered in scarlet.

  “I suppose—” Susan twisted the end of the scarf round her chapped fingers. “Jemmy. Jemmy Moore.”

  “He was one of her lovers?” Mélanie asked.

  “He was her first lover. She ran off to London with him. She threw him over soon enough, but—” Susan turned her gaze toward the fireplace corner. The shadows were kind to her. Beneath the paint, her face had a delicate, heart-shaped sweetness. “Nell kept going back to Jemmy. Not for long, but consistently. If you were of a romantic turn, you’d call it love.”

  “Where is he now?” Charles asked.

  “Probably picking someone’s pocket or trying to break into a house, assuming he hasn’t managed to get himself hanged in the past few months.”

  “He’s a thief?” Mélanie said.

  “Not a very good one, but he manages to scrape together a living.” Another cough seized her. She brought the crumpled handkerchief up to her mouth. “Most of which he loses at the gaming tables.”

  “Where does he live?” Charles asked.

  “I haven’t the least idea.” She folded the handkerchief. Bright red spots showed against the yellowed linen. “He changed lodgings half a dozen times in the years I knew him. But from sometime after midnight until the early hours of the morning, he can usually be found at Mannerling’s gaming hell. A friend of mine saw him there just this past year.”

  Mélanie looked from the handkerchief to Susan’s face. She should have read the signs in the fine-drawn translucence of Susan’s skin sooner. She’d grown all too familiar with the inexorable ravages of consumption during her time in the brothel. “What does Jemmy Moore look like?” she asked.