Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  Memory drifted across Susan’s face. “Curly black hair. Blue eyes. Not too tall, but nicely made if he’s taken care of himself. He had a fondness for yellow waistcoats.”

  Mélanie released her breath, though she hadn’t realized she’d been holding it. “Thank you.”

  “It’s little enough.”

  The whistles had given way to stomping feet. Amy Graves, now standing on the table, pulled her chemise over her head and tossed it into the crowd.

  Susan swallowed the last of her gin. She looked at Mélanie for a moment over the rim of the glass. “Your little boy—is it dangerous?”

  “Yes,” Mélanie said.

  Susan nodded. “I hope—I hope it turns out all right.”

  Two men were having a tug-of-war with Amy Graves’s chemise. Amy was stretched out naked on the table. A full glass of claret rested on the curling thatch between her legs. The pimply young man who had pawed Mélanie was leaning forward and attempting to drink out of it, while onlookers shouted words of encouragement or mockery.

  Charles leaned his arms on the table. He hadn’t so much as glanced in Amy Graves’s direction. “Someone else may come asking questions about your sister. A dark-haired man with a Spanish accent. It would be convenient if you could lose your memory.”

  Susan smiled, a smile that curved her full mouth and lit her eyes and wiped the harshness from her face. “Faith, sir, my memory’s not what it once was. It’s a miracle I’ve remembered what I have tonight, it is.”

  Mélanie put some more coins on the table. “Do you think—”

  “Here now—you’ve had your turn!” The crash of a chair hitting the floor echoed through the room. A man in a stained bottle-green coat grabbed the pimply young man by the shoulder and pulled him off Amy Graves.

  The glass of claret tipped over and shattered on the table. Amy Graves sat up with a cry. The pimply man spun round and shoved the man in the green coat. The man in the green coat stumbled back and fell against a woman at the next table. The woman screamed. Her escort planted a fist in Green Coat’s face.

  “Oh, hell,” Susan said, “now we’re in for it.”

  She was right. Mélanie wasn’t sure quite what happened next, but suddenly half those present seemed to be involved in the fight. Chairs splintered. Glasses shattered. A table was upended. Shouts and curses, cries of rage and pain and the sheer love of battle filled the air. A glass hit the painting and left a splash of red wine on one of Zeus’s wings. Amy Graves scrambled up on the table, arms crossed over her breasts.

  Charles glanced at the door. “I wouldn’t try it,” Susan said over the din round them. “Wait till it calms down.”

  Charles nodded and grabbed Mélanie’s arm. Mélanie snatched up her bonnet and pelisse and they drew back into the corner by the fireplace.

  “It’s a while since we’ve had one of these,” Susan said. “This one’s worse than usual. Look out!” She ducked and Charles pulled Mélanie down just as a bottle went sailing across the room and shattered against the brick of the chimney.

  The fight was eddying out into the farthest reaches of the room. A man in his shirtsleeves vaulted over the stair rail and hurled himself into the fray.

  Charles had gone still. He was staring across the room, as though he glimpsed something in the melee, though Mélanie couldn’t imagine what he could make out in the sea of movement. She touched his arm. “Darling—”

  He answered without looking at her. “Mel—”

  She didn’t hear the rest. Someone crashed into them. She dodged, but the next thing she knew a fist smashed into the side of her face. Pain slammed through her head and down her side. Her head swam blackly for a moment. She felt Charles’s hands on her shoulders, heard his voice mutter, “Get under the table,” saw a rush of movement as he sprang forward.

  The fight engulfed them. Charles knocked a man to the ground. Someone else grabbed him from behind and gave his arm a vicious twist. Mélanie jumped on a chair and threw her pelisse over the attacker’s head. Charles spun round and hit him through the enveloping folds of fabric.

  Another man crashed into Charles from the side—the man in the bottle-green coat, who had started the brawl. His hands went straight for Charles’s throat. Charles jerked and twisted. The first assailant struggled free of the folds of the pelisse and launched himself at Charles’s legs.

  Mélanie snatched up a glass from the table and brought it down on Green Coat’s balding head with as much force as she could muster. White fire shot through the wound in her side, but Green Coat yelped and let go of Charles. Charles kicked the other man, grabbed her hand, and jumped over an overturned chair.

  “There’s a side door.” Susan Trevennen spoke beside them, fighting to make herself heard over the shouts and screams and crashes that filled the air. “This way.”

  They dodged and elbowed their way past the fireplace and along the side of the room to a low wooden door. Their feet slithered on the liquor-soaked floorboards, and broken glass scrunched beneath their shoes. Susan had grabbed a spare bottle off a table as they moved past. She tossed the contents over two men who were grappling in front of the door. A temporary path cleared.

  “Go now.” She tugged the door open, letting in a blast of rain-soaked wind. “Good luck.”

  They stumbled out into a narrow, unlit alley. Charles pulled the door to behind them. The rain blew in their faces and the wind slapped against them, but the quiet was a blessed relief. Mélanie leaned against the rough stone wall long enough to draw a deep breath of the night air. “The man who started the fight was one of the ones who attacked you,” she said. “The fight was a setup.”

  “Very likely.” Charles stripped off his coat and put it round her shoulders. The umbrella had been abandoned inside, along with his greatcoat and hat and her pelisse and bonnet. He threw a sheltering arm over her shoulders and drew her toward the light at the near end of the alley. He walked quickly, but he wasn’t quite steady on his feet.

  “Did you break anything?” Mélanie asked.

  “I don’t think so, but not for want of their trying. The first man very definitely meant to break my arm.”

  “I noticed.” They walked a few steps in silence. The wind howled through the alley. The rain felt like melted ice through the thin fabric of her gown.

  Charles steered her round a puddle of water. “I saw a familiar face in the midst of the brawl. Victor Velasquez.”

  “From the Spanish embassy?” She lifted her face to the rain to look up at him. Victor Velasquez was an attaché at the embassy, a distant acquaintance from their days in the Peninsula, an occasional dancing partner. He was also a committed royalist, violently opposed to those like Carevalo who sought to change the Spanish government. It took her a moment to put the pieces together, probably because she was so cold. “You think he’s Iago Lorano?”

  “He fits the general description and it’s a bit too much of a coincidence otherwise. His grandmother was a Carevalo, which would give him an added interest in the ring. We were saying that if the royalists wanted to make use of the ring they’d have to find a royalist Carevalo cousin to take possession of it. Velasquez would be the perfect choice.”

  They had reached the mouth of the alley. Villiers Street was empty in the immediate vicinity. Charles drew her forward into the yellow glow of a street lamp and glanced up and down the street. “Our best chance of a hackney is probably—”

  A report ripped through the air. It was only when Charles collapsed against her and she smelled the cloying sweetness of blood that she realized the sound had been a gunshot.

  Chapter 17

  I nstinct took over, honed by years of dodging snipers’ bullets in the Spanish mountains. Mélanie dragged her husband out of the telltale circle of lamplight, back into the concealing dark of the mouth of the alley, and pushed him against the support of a lime-washed wall. “Charles? Where are you hit?”

  “My leg. Right. Upper thigh.” His voice was hoarse. “Where did the shot come from
?”

  “I can’t tell.” She scanned the sliver of street behind them. Light shone behind several first-floor windows, but all the curtains seemed to be drawn. She glanced down at his leg. She could see a rent in the fabric, but not much more in the cloaking darkness of the alley. She put her hand over the wound and felt the sticky warmth of blood. Still flowing, but not spurting. He wasn’t likely to pass out. She pulled up her skirt, tore a strip from her chemise, and bound it round his thigh. “Can you walk to the far end of the alley if I help you?”

  “You’re in no shape to support me, Mel. Look after yourself. I’ll manage.”

  “You’re a bloody awful liar, Charles. I got you this far, I can manage the rest. Put your arm across my shoulders.”

  He had the sense not to protest further. He walked, after a fashion, with his arm across her shoulders and hers about his waist and his right leg dragging awkwardly. Her side didn’t seem to hurt as much as it had before. Perhaps the chill of the rain and wind was making her numb all over.

  They passed the closed side door of the Gilded Lily and made their way agonizing step by step to the far end of the alley and the next street over. She got Charles into the shelter of the first doorway and scanned the street. No carriages. A cluster of brothels or taverns or gin mills to the right. The lights of what might be a lodging house to the left. A few women with shawls thrown over their low-cut gowns, leaning in darkened shop doorways, looking for custom despite the weather. A trio of boys trying to roast potatoes over a smoldering fire in a doorway on the opposite side of the street.

  “Wait here,” she said to Charles, and darted across the street before he could protest.

  The boys looked up at her approach, wariness writ in their expressions. Mercifully, she had managed to hang onto her reticule. She fished out three half crowns. “One for each of you, and another for the first one who can bring me a hackney.”

  The boys stared at her for a moment in the light of their fire. Then all three grabbed the coins and were off like a shot.

  “They may use the money to buy themselves a place by a warm fire instead of looking for a hackney,” Charles said when she rejoined him. He was breathing erratically between the words.

  “They’ll come back. They’re old enough to know that two half crowns can buy a lot more than one.” She leaned against him for warmth, though they were both so frozen she doubted it would make any difference. Tremors wracked his body, but he wrapped his arms round her and rubbed her shoulders.

  After an interval that was probably only ten minutes, though it felt like thirty, she was proved right. A mud-spattered hackney came trundling down the street with the smallest of the three boys running beside it. When she and Charles stepped out of the doorway, battered and bedraggled, the driver nearly took off again, but he stopped when she waved a pound note in his face. “Berkeley Square. As quickly as possible.”

  Charles made a protesting sound. “We have to have someone look at your leg,” she said. “Besides, we can’t hope to find Jemmy Moore until past midnight. And we should see if Addison and Blanca learned anything.” She half pushed him into the carriage with the help of the young boy who had found the hackney. She pressed another pound note into the boy’s hand, climbed into the carriage after Charles, pulled the door shut behind her, and collapsed on the dry seat.

  “Has your wound started bleeding again?” Charles said from the opposite end of the seat.

  “I can’t tell. It doesn’t hurt too badly.” That wasn’t strictly true, but it could have been a great deal worse. “Do you think the bullet broke a bone in your leg?”

  “No.”

  She shot him a sideways glance. She couldn’t make out his features in the dark, but his breathing sounded even more labored than before. “You’d say that anyway. I don’t know why I bother asking.” She folded her arms and realized she was shaking. Cold or delayed fear, she couldn’t say which. Her gown was plastered to her skin and she thought her half-boots were soaked through, though she couldn’t quite feel her toes. “If Victor Velasquez is Iago Lorano, how do you think he found us? I’d have sworn no one followed us from the Marshalsea. I thought we could trust Hugo Trevennen not to talk.”

  “Perhaps someone else at the Marshalsea told Velasquez about Susan. She visits her uncle. She must be known there.”

  She rubbed her arms. The trembling wouldn’t stop. “Victor Velasquez is no fool, but he’s a soldier turned diplomat, not an intelligence agent. I wouldn’t have thought he’d have the skills to organize all these attacks so quickly.”

  “Quite. Which is why I still wonder if O’Roarke’s behind the attacks.”

  “Charles, I told you Raoul wouldn’t—”

  “Attack you.” He drew a rasping breath. “You didn’t say anything about me. Perhaps he wants you back.”

  She managed a laugh. “My darling Charles, if Raoul wanted me back, he wouldn’t let anything as conventional as a marriage tie stand in his way. He also knows me well enough to realize he wouldn’t have a prayer of getting me without my cooperation. Besides, Raoul rarely wastes energy on anything as mundane as personal relationships.”

  She felt Charles’s gaze on her in the gloom of the carriage, hard and direct. “Mel, I may be blind to a lot of things, but it’s obvious that the man’s still in love with you.”

  She jerked and stared at him, but she could only make out the outline of his profile. “Don’t be stupid, Charles. If Raoul’s ever been in love, it wasn’t with me. He keeps a lock of some woman’s hair in a fob on his watch chain. But it’s certainly not mine—he had it before I met him and anyway it’s blond. That’s the closest I’ve ever seen him come to showing any sentimentality.”

  Charles made no reply and said nothing further until they pulled up in Berkeley Square. The sight of the twin filigree lampposts spilling light onto their own portico was a blessed relief. She paid off the driver and helped Charles up the steps, arms shaking, half-boots squelching on the stone. The second footman, Michael, opened the door in answer to her ring, stared open-mouthed for an instant, then made haste to take Charles’s weight from her shoulder.

  “Thank you, Michael.” She stepped into the welcome warmth of the entrance hall, dripping rainwater all over the black-and-white marble of the tiles. Her legs seemed to have turned to jelly. She gripped the console table for a moment. “Is Captain Fraser here?”

  “Yes, madam, he’s in the library.”

  “Good. Help Mr. Fraser in there. Then go to Dr. Blackwell in Hill Street. If he’s out for the evening, find where he’s gone and go after him. Tell him I’m sorry to disturb him, but Mr. Fraser’s been shot and it’s an emergency.” Geoffrey Blackwell could be trusted to come quickly. He was an old friend, and his wife was Charles’s cousin.

  Mélanie ran ahead to open the library doors. Inside she found not only Edgar but the children’s governess, Laura Dudley. Edgar was pacing before the fireplace, while Laura sat bolt upright in a chair, twisting something that looked like it had once been a piece of mending in her hands.

  “Mélanie.” Edgar came toward her. “I was starting to worry—Good God.” He caught sight of Michael staggering under Charles’s weight and ran to their side.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks.” Charles’s voice was remarkably steady, but now that they were inside Mélanie could see a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “Give me your arm, brother, so Michael can be off on his mercy mission.”

  “Warm water and clean cloths,” Mélanie said to Laura. “And blankets and a dressing gown. Are Addison and Blanca back?”

  “Blanca is. She didn’t learn anything. She’s in the nursery with Jessica. Addison’s still out.” Laura hurried from the room without further questions. Edgar helped Charles to a high-backed chair in front of the fire.

  Mélanie dropped down beside him, unknotted the strip of linen—which took longer than it should have because her chilled fingers wouldn’t cooperate—and got her first proper look at the wound. The bullet had entered the fleshy p
art of his thigh, thank God. He was probably right that no bones were broken. The wound was still bleeding, but not profusely. “Geoffrey will have to dig the bullet out, but I can clean it,” she said. “Can you manage to get your trousers off or shall we cut them away?”

  “I can manage if Edgar helps with my boots.” His rib cage shook with each breath. “Intercept Laura and bring me my dressing gown.”

  Mélanie met Laura at the door and took the things from her. Between them, she and Edgar got Charles wrapped in the dressing gown. She cleaned the wound as best she could while Charles sipped from a large glass of whisky Edgar had pressed into his hand. Laura hovered in the background, managing to be near when necessary yet not violate decorum.

  “Stop fussing at it, Mel.” Charles tossed down the last of the whisky. “I won’t die before Geoffrey gets here. Go up and see Jessica and put on a dry gown before you catch a chill.”

  The reminder of their daughter convinced her. Her gown was half dry and she had stopped shivering, so she went to Jessica’s room first. She found Jessica curled up on the sofa beside Blanca, listening to a story. The moment Mélanie stepped into the room, Jessica jumped down, ran across the room, and hurled herself at her mother’s legs.

  Mélanie knelt beside Jessica and hugged her with a tightness that even she recognized as desperation.

  Jessica wrapped her arms round Mélanie’s neck and buried her face in Mélanie’s shoulder, the way she did when she’d had a nightmare or when she’d been frightened by the guns at a military review or on a memorable occasion that involved smugglers, excisemen, and a particularly treacherous stretch of the Perthshire coast. Mélanie drew her daughter over to the window seat. She and Charles didn’t exactly have a perfect record for keeping their children out of danger, but at least whatever happened they’d managed to protect Colin and Jessica. So far.