Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

“Edgar,” Mélanie said, “if you’re going to say I can’t go there—”

  Edgar gave her a smile that made him look very like Charles. “At this point, I wouldn’t dare tell you not to do anything, sister.”

  Charles shifted his leg on the footstool. “We’ll leave at eleven-thirty. Depending on what we learn, at dawn one or more of us can start for Surrey to see Mrs. Jennings. How long until you have to report to Castlereagh, Edgar?”

  “I sent him a message when I got here saying I hadn’t been able to discover anything so far. That will do until tomorrow. Thank God Lydia’s in the country with her parents. I couldn’t silence her questions so easily.”

  Mélanie walked to the sideboard, poured herself a glass of whisky, and swallowed half of it in one gulp. Now that Charles’s wound had been treated, the churning need to keep moving, to be doing something, anything, was back. She glanced at the mantel clock. Eight-thirty. Less than twenty-four hours since Colin had been taken.

  “More than three hours before we can hope to find Jemmy Moore,” Charles said behind her.

  “Yes.” She returned to the fireplace and dropped down in a chair across from him. He was still very pale, but he was no longer shaking and his breathing seemed more regular. “Darling, shouldn’t we see if we can find Victor Velasquez and tell him about Colin? He might call off his hounds.”

  Charles’s gaze had shifted to the fire. “No,” he said without glancing at her.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t think it would persuade him to call off his hounds.”

  “I know he’s a royalist to the bone and he hates Carevalo, but he always struck me as fundamentally decent. It’s worth a try—”

  “And because if Velasquez knew my son was in danger it might make him all the more eager to do whatever it takes to stop us.”

  She set her glass down on the table beside her. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  He continued to look into the fire. There was a set quality to his expression, as though he were holding pain at bay, but she wasn’t sure the pain came from the bullet wound. Edgar, standing beside the fireplace, had gone very still.

  “Why doesn’t matter,” Charles said.

  “Doesn’t matter?” Mélanie leaned forward. “Anything that may have a bearing on what’s happened to Colin matters.”

  A muscle twitched beside Charles’s jaw. “My history with Victor Velasquez doesn’t. Trust me.”

  Edgar cleared his throat. “Mélanie, perhaps it would be best—”

  “Stay out of this, Edgar.” She sprang to her feet, leaned over the chair, and grabbed Charles by the shoulders. “Charles Kenneth Malcolm Fraser, our son’s life is at stake.”

  He looked up at her, his eyes cold and hard. “I had grasped that fact.”

  Her grip on his shoulders tightened. “Then stop being so bloody high-handed.”

  “Mélanie, the least you can do is trust me when I say it’s unimportant—”

  “Goddamnit, Charles.” Her face was inches from his. “Don’t you dare try to tell me that anything is unimportant that may have the smallest chance of having anything to do with why Colin’s been taken or with this damned ring that’s the key to getting him back. You have no right to make that sort of decision for yourself.”

  His gaze locked with hers. His face was like a thing carved from alabaster in the firelight. “Velasquez hates me. He has a right to hate me.”

  She held his gaze with her own. “Why?”

  He released his breath, a sound harsher than when Geoffrey was digging the bullet out of his leg. “Because I murdered his cousin.”

  Chapter 18

  M élanie slackened her grip on Charles’s shoulders and drew back.

  Edgar stared down at his brother. “Charles, for God’s sake, what are you talking about?”

  “She has a point, Edgar.” Charles kept his gaze on Mélanie. “Husbands and wives shouldn’t have secrets from each other.”

  That last was a challenge. Mélanie took him up on it. “No, they shouldn’t.” She dropped back into her chair. “At least once the truth is out, it can be faced.”

  “An interesting way of putting it.” They regarded each other for a moment. The day’s revelations thrummed in the air between them, like pistol shots echoing across the green after a duel.

  Edgar sat down on a cushioned bench between them. “Charles, I may not know your secrets as I did when we were boys, but I’d stake my life on it that you didn’t murder anyone.”

  “There we’re in agreement,” Mélanie said. She leaned back against the carved mahogany slats of the chair. “Charles? Without the melodrama?”

  “She’s dead,” Charles said. “If it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t be. You could call that murder.”

  Quiet settled over the library, an uneasy quiet that precedes a storm. The tension of words as yet unvoiced pressed against the oak wainscot. “Who?” Mélanie asked.

  “Kitty—Katelina Ashford.”

  Edgar sucked in his breath. “Charles—” He looked at his brother, as though Charles was a man pushing himself beyond the limits of his endurance. “Are you sure you want to tell us this?”

  “Not in the least, but I don’t see an alternative.”

  “Kitty Ashford?” Mélanie sifted through her memories, trying to find an image to go with the half-remembered name. Her first days in Lisbon. A party at the embassy. Two officers’ wives whispering behind the ivory sticks of their fans. “She was a Spanish noblewoman married to an English officer. She died. Not long before I came to Lisbon. Some sort of accident. I forgot she was Velasquez’s cousin. So that means she was connected to Carevalo, too?”

  “Aristocratic families are as intermarried in Spain as they are here. Kitty and Victor’s grandmother was a Carevalo daughter who married a Velasquez. Their daughter was Kitty’s mother and their son was Victor’s father.” Charles’s voice sounded distanced, as though he was speaking about events that had little meaning for him. Charles only spoke like that when his feelings were very near to the surface indeed. “Kitty and Velasquez were close as children. I think he was half in love with her. It’s not surprising. She was quite lovely.”

  His voice had an odd quality to it as he said this last. For a moment his gaze was somewhere beyond the confines of the library. It occurred to Mélanie that she had never, in the seven years she had known him, heard him describe another woman as lovely. The word lingered in the air, with echoes that went beyond mere physical beauty. Her fingers closed on the gros de Naples folds of her gown. “She met her husband during the war?”

  Charles’s gaze moved over the mantel as though he could not bear to keep still—the invitations she’d stuck into the gilt frame of the chimney glass, the wax tapers burning in the silver candlesticks, the Meissen tinderbox they’d brought back from Vienna. “Edward Ashford went to Spain with Sir John Moore in ’08. He and Kitty were betrothed before Corunna and married a few months later. Kitty stayed in Lisbon. I think she would have been happier following the drum, but Ashford was the sort who believed women—wives, at least—are meant to be sheltered. And I think he liked being free to pursue Spanish girls on the campaign.”

  Mélanie folded her hands. She could see where the story was going. Or where with most men one would think it was going. It did not fit what she knew of her husband. What she thought she knew. “Go on.”

  “We met at a party at the embassy in Christmas of ’09. I’d taken refuge in the library.”

  “What a surprise,” Mélanie murmured.

  He smiled, a faint lift of his mouth that didn’t reach his eyes. “Not really. The surprise was that Kitty slipped into the room, claimed she was bored to tears, and asked if I minded if she joined me.”

  “And?”

  “We played chess. She won.”

  No wonder she had caught Charles’s interest. Mélanie’s gaze flickered toward the table that held the chess game she and Charles had begun—was it only yesterday? Charles had had her in check when they
left off, though she’d seen a way out of it. She could imagine the scene at that Christmas party in 1809. She knew the library in the British embassy well—she’d gone into the room often enough in search of her errant husband at some embassy function. She could imagine Charles—a younger Charles, he would have been only twenty-two—shoulders sunk into one of the burgundy leather chairs, head bent over Adam Smith or John Donne or the latest London papers. She could imagine Kitty Ashford slipping into the room.

  Unusual coloring for a Spaniard. The words of the officers’ wives came back to her with sudden clarity. Hair like honey and the prettiest green eyes. Charles would have been startled at the interruption, embarrassed perhaps, and then—

  “You were so delighted to find someone who could give you a good game that you began to play chess a great deal?” Mélanie said. The words came out sounding more arch than she intended.

  Charles looked into the fire, as though scenes from the past flickered between the griffons’ heads on the andirons. “We played chess. She borrowed books from me. She convinced me to take her riding outside the city, places an officer’s wife wouldn’t normally go. Kit had a restless intellect and a rebellious streak. I think that was what had drawn her to Ashford in the first place. An English soldier was the most daring and adventurous husband she could choose. Or so it seemed. She couldn’t have picked anyone more rigidly conventional than Ashford.”

  Mélanie willed her shoulders to relax. Don’t let yourself get locked into a pattern. Raoul’s cool, steady voice echoed unexpectedly in her head. It can be fatal. Always be ready to shift the facts, to look at them in a new way. She studied her husband, the tension about his mouth, the shadows round his eyes and in their depths. She forced herself to let her image of the man he had been when they met break apart in her mind. “The Ashfords’ marriage was a disaster,” she said. “To all intents and purposes it was over before you met Kitty. You wouldn’t have let what seems to have happened between you happen if it had been otherwise.”

  His mouth twisted. “Two steps ahead of me as usual, Mel. You’re right on both counts. Though it didn’t…happen for some time. Oh, I’ll admit that from the first I—”

  “Wanted her,” Mélanie said.

  He looked into her eyes. “Crude but true.”

  “Dear God.” Edgar pushed himself to his feet. “Mélanie, you shouldn’t have to listen—”

  “It’s all right, Edgar. I know Charles wasn’t a virgin when he married me.”

  Edgar regarded her with that puzzled expression he always wore when she said something particularly blunt.

  Charles looked at his brother. “Did you know? About Kitty and me? I always wondered.”

  “Not then.” Edgar ran his hand through his hair, the way Charles often did. “I wasn’t in Lisbon much in those days. Though I was at that reception the night she—the night she had her accident. Christ, it was awful. But I had no idea that she was your—A few weeks later, I heard some gossip in the officers’ mess.” He drew a breath. Beneath the embarrassment, his face ached with regret. “I wish you could have confided in me, Charles.”

  “You think you could have saved me from my folly?”

  “I wouldn’t presume. But after she died—you shouldn’t have had to bear your burdens alone.”

  Charles’s gaze went bleak. “One could argue that that was the least I deserved.”

  Edgar turned away, as though he had glimpsed something he didn’t want to face. He crossed to the table where the decanters were kept. “She’d have been a hard woman for any man to resist. She—Oh, God, Mélanie, I keep putting my foot in it.”

  Mélanie smiled at him over her shoulder. “I’d already heard her described as beautiful.”

  “There was a brightness about her.” Edgar rejoined them, carrying a glass and the whisky decanter. He stared down at the cut glass, shot through by the light of the fire. “A sort of reckless brilliance.”

  “Yes.” Charles spoke without looking at his brother. “She met life head-on instead of shying away from it. Which was why sitting cooped up with the other officers’ wives in Lisbon was exactly the wrong place for her.”

  Edgar refilled Charles’s and Mélanie’s glasses, splashed whisky into a glass for himself, and returned to the bench.

  Charles took a quick swallow of whisky, tented his fingers together, and said, as if reciting a date from a history book, “By early 1812 we were lovers.”

  Mélanie realized her hands were gripped tight in her lap. She knew Charles had had mistresses of course. Though he was no rake, he’d been far from inexperienced when they married. She’d never questioned him about those liaisons, but she’d always assumed he’d chosen women with whom there was no risk of emotional intimacy. He’d retreated into the safer realms of the intellect long before he reached adulthood. Detachment had been a survival mechanism, a way of coping with his father’s cutting tongue and his mother’s violent moods, and then later with his mother’s death and his own estrangement from his brother. He hadn’t let his guard down with anyone until he met Mélanie.

  Or so she had always thought. So he had led her to believe. But there was no mistaking what lay beneath his bonedry, factual statement. Despite the overlay of bitterness and pain, his face held an echo of what he had felt for Kitty Ashford. An echo not of lust but of an unbearable longing.

  “There was no hope for it, of course.” Charles spoke with the clinical detachment she had heard Geoffrey Blackwell use when he amputated a gangrenous limb. “I did try to convince her to run off to Italy with me, but she wouldn’t leave her husband. Kit could rebel, but she took the family honor seriously. She told me once that her debt to her family went back generations. How could a love of a few months hope to compete?” He drew a breath. The wine-colored silk of his dressing gown shimmered in the firelight. “In April I was sent to retrieve some papers from Valencia. While I was gone, Kitty realized she was pregnant.”

  Edgar made a strangled sound. “Good God.”

  “Quite,” Charles said.

  Mélanie’s nails pressed into her palms. She began to have a sickening sense of where the story was headed. “Her husband was away as well?”

  “Oh, yes. Ashford hadn’t been home in two months and wasn’t expected to return until after the campaigning season. Her options were not pleasant.”

  “Charles,” Edgar said in a hoarse voice.

  Charles glanced at his brother with something between defiance and apology. “It’s an ugly story, Edgar. But it’s got to be finished. I’m sorry for the associations.”

  Edgar made no reply. Rain pattered against the long library windows. Mélanie felt the heat of the fire, the hardness of the chair at her back, the dull ache of her wound. “Kitty’s death wasn’t an accident.”

  “No. She threw herself off a footbridge in the garden during a reception at the embassy.”

  The silence was broken by the sound of crystal shattering. Edgar’s whisky glass had fallen from his fingers, hit the leg of the bench, and broken into shards on the chestnut and gold of the carpet. Without speaking, he got to his feet and strode from the room.

  The pungent smell of whisky filled the air. Mélanie closed her eyes for a moment. “How do you know?”

  “Velasquez. He was the only person in whom she’d confided about her predicament. When I returned to Lisbon, he came to see me, told me the truth of her death, and challenged me to a duel.”

  “You fought him?” Charles was a crack shot, but he abhorred dueling as an archaic way of settling differences.

  “I fought him. At the time I rather hoped he’d put a bullet through me, but he was drunk and only grazed my arm. I deloped.” He looked up at her with a gaze from which he had forced all emotion. “So you see, it wouldn’t necessarily help if Victor Velasquez knew we want the ring to get Colin back. Kitty wasn’t the only one who took the family honor seriously. I think Velasquez feels he has yet to avenge her. He might weigh Colin in the scale against the baby who died with Kitty.”
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br />   Mélanie got to her feet and walked to the fireplace without knowing what she meant to do. She stared down into the fire, the leaping flame, the wrought-metal grate, the sticks of pine with their sweet, clean smell, redolent of her first memories of Britain when she came here as Charles’s wife. With a few words, an illusion that had been at the heart of her marriage had shattered like the crystal of Edgar’s glass. “You already did that,” she said.

  “Did what?”

  “Weighed Colin in the scale against Kitty’s baby.” She turned, leaned against the mantel, looked at her husband, the father of her children. For a moment, she wondered if she’d ever really understood him at all. “It was only—what? seven months?—after Kitty died that you were sent after the ring. And you found me, a woman without protection, with a fatherless child on the way. I know you’re not one to believe in fate, darling, but it must have seemed the perfect opportunity to make up for failing Kitty and your own baby.”

  He shook his head. “If you think that’s why I asked you to marry me, you aren’t as good a judge of character as I always thought.”

  “No?” She studied the face she knew so well, the eyes that mirrored so many of her memories. His head was tilted down in that way that gave him the unexpected look of a vulnerable schoolboy. It hit her, with the force of a blow, the full horror this would have been for Charles. Charles, who planned, who foresaw consequences, who seldom—if ever—let his passions rule his head, who took his responsibilities seriously, who loved his children without condition. “It wasn’t your fault she killed herself, Charles.”

  “It was my fault she was pregnant.”

  “Both your faults. I assume the affair was mutual.”

  “Yes. It was that.” Something shifted in his eyes. For a moment she realized he was speaking to her not as a woman who had betrayed him, not even as his wife, but as his closest friend. She hadn’t thought he would ever speak to her in that way again. He leaned forward. “But Kit had more to lose, so I was the one who should have been careful. Don’t try to tell me I’m blameless, Mel. Not you, of all people.”