Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  “With O’Roarke.”

  “Yes.” She pleated the rough blue wool of the blanket between her fingers. “I never had a nightmare when I was playing a role until that night in the mountains with you.”

  A few hours ago he might have said, What a clever way to add to the deception. Now he merely walked back to the settle, folded the lint into a pad, and placed it over the wound in her side.

  She held the bandage in place while he fastened it with a length of lint bound round her ribs. “Papá was an actor—an actor-manager, though not nearly so grand as Kemble. He had a small troupe that traveled in the provinces on both sides of the French-Spanish border. He met Mamá when he was performing in Barcelona. Her parents were landowners—what you’d call ‘country gentry’ here. I never met them. They disowned her when she eloped with Papá—an actor, a Frenchman, and a Jew to boot.” She looked up at him. “Do you remember the pearl cross Edgar and Lydia gave me last Christmas? That’s why I don’t like to wear it.”

  “Understandable.” He knotted the lint and clipped off the ends.

  “A silly sort of weakness. Just the sort of thing that betrays you, Raoul would say.”

  She stood, arms raised. He took a fresh chemise from her valise and dropped it over her head in place of the sweat-soaked one she’d been wearing. “Your father’s favorite writer was Beaumarchais?” he said.

  “Next to Shakespeare.” Her head emerged from the folds of linen and lace. “How did you guess?”

  “Suzanne.”

  She gave a brief smile. “I never got to play Figaro’s Suzanne. Papá said I could when I was sixteen.”

  “I take it he was an ardent supporter of the revolution.”

  “Dear God, yes.” She gave a dry laugh. “Poor word choice again. Papá didn’t believe in God. I wish I could have seen him in the early days of the revolution. By the time I was born the Terror had begun and one couldn’t be an idealist without a healthy dose of cynicism. Still, his beliefs never died. He passed his love of liberty on to me, along with his love of theater.”

  “Did your mother act as well?”

  “She was back onstage a fortnight after I was born.” Mélanie stepped into her gown and slid her arms into the long sleeves. “I’m not sure which she fell in love with first, Papá or the theater, but she was mad for both. They put me onstage before I could walk. I grew up traveling from town to town, falling asleep in dressing rooms, helping actors practice their lines, experimenting with greasepaint.” She tugged the pale gray fabric over her shoulders. “It was a happy childhood.”

  “So that’s how you learned Shakespeare backwards and forwards.”

  She dropped onto the settle. “I knew the plays in French and Spanish before I read the English. I was the changeling boy in Midsummer Night’s Dream when I was three, one of the princes in the Tower when I was five, Ariel when I was ten. Mamá never got to see that. She died when Rosie was born.”

  “Rosie?” He stared down at the row of hooks and eyes on her gown. “Rosine?”

  “Rosalind. I told you Papá liked Shakespeare even better than Beaumarchais. He wanted to call me Beatrice, but Mamá said it was too much of a mouthful for a child. They compromised on Mélanie. She convinced him it was after the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.”

  He fastened the first of the hooks, his gaze fixed on the flattened copper and the shiny gray fabric. “How much younger was Rosie?”

  “Seven years.”

  “So you mothered her.”

  “In a sense.” She fingered the bands of charcoal satin on her cuffs. “There were a great many people to take care of us, but not having a mother made us that much closer.”

  “It was much the same for Edgar and Gisèle and me. We had a mother, of course, but we often didn’t see her for months at a time.” He did up the last hook and straightened the narrow lace ruff at her throat. “Being the eldest takes on an added weight.”

  She bent her head, her gaze on her hands. “Colin reminds me of Rosie, more than Jessica. The dark hair, the pale skin, the strong brows. She had a stubborn streak. Colin and Jessica are easier to cope with. Or perhaps I’m the one who’s improved.” She leaned toward the fire, hands between her knees. “We were in Spain in December of 1808. I was playing Juliet for the first time.”

  Charles moved to the fireplace and looked at her vivid face. Despite the shadows round her eyes, a clear, fresh, heartbreaking sweetness shone through. She would have been an enchanting Juliet. “I’d give a great deal to have seen you.”

  Her mouth curved in a bleak smile. “I’m sure I didn’t grasp all the nuances—though I felt terribly sophisticated—but people thought it a great novelty to have Juliet played by a girl who was almost as young as the character’s meant to be.”

  Charles dug his shoulder into the pine mantel. The year 1808 had been the early days of the war in the Peninsula. The French, who had occupied the country, had been temporarily driven back by the Spanish resistance. Napoleon had come to Spain himself with reinforcements to retake the country. A British expeditionary force under Sir John Moore was supposed to be assisting the increasingly fragmented Spanish resistance, but Moore had been forced into an inglorious retreat to the coast by the victorious French. “Did your father have any idea how dangerous it was?”

  “We were actors. There were people in the company who supported both sides. He thought we’d be all right as long as we stayed out of the path of the various armies.” Her fingers twisted in the delicate fabric of her skirt. “One of the company had family in a village not too far from Léon. We spent Christmas there. Sir John Moore’s army came through the village on their retreat.”

  A knot of cold closed round Charles’s throat. He’d heard stories of Moore’s retreat. The British army had been angry at retreating without a proper fight, and the commissary could not keep them adequately provisioned. Discipline had almost completely collapsed. Pillage and wholesale slaughter had been visited on more than one Spanish village in their path.

  “The house we were staying in was on the edge of the town square,” Mélanie said. “It was afternoon. The people we were visiting had gone out. Papá and Rosie and I were alone in the house with two of the other actors. Rosie and I were fighting. She was pestering me to play dolls and I was trying to mend a rent in my costume. We heard horses’ hooves and then screams from the square. Papá and the actors ran outside. He told us to hide, but I looked through the window.” She drew a quick breath. “I saw the bullet that struck him. It went through his head.”

  Charles stared at her bent dark head for a moment, then walked to the table. He looked down at the flaky game pie, the wedge of Stilton, the congealing dish of eggs. A coppery taste welled up on his tongue. “And then?”

  She didn’t look at him. Her voice was level in a way that only came with a massive effort at control. “‘Liberty of bloody hand…With conscience wide as hell.’ You’ve heard Edgar talk about what happened after Badajoz, darling. It was much the same, though on a smaller scale.”

  The blue and white dishes wavered before his eyes. After the siege of Badajoz, the British army had indulged in an orgy of plunder and rape and destruction. His brother’s voice echoed in his head. The things I saw men do, Charles. Men I knew. Good men. Honorable men. It was as if they were in the grip of a collective madness. Even Wellington knew he couldn’t stop it. And Sir John Moore had had far less control over his army than Wellington later did.

  He poured a cup of coffee, filling the cup to an exact mark just below the lusterware rim. He carried the coffee over to her and put it in her hand, curling her fingers round the cup. She gulped down a sip and sat holding the cup between her hands like a talisman.

  “They…well, you can imagine what they did to every female they could get their hands on. Four soldiers burst into the house where Rosie and I were hiding. There’s no point in going into the details and I don’t remember very much of it, which is a mercy, I suppose. The ceiling was white plaster with oak beams. One of the beams
had a crack in it, and there was a cobweb in the corner. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of that ceiling.”

  Charles’s fingers curled inward, until his nails cut into his palms.

  “It’s difficult to separate the reality from my nightmares,” she said. “At some point they dragged us outside. I remember crawling through the square afterwards looking for Rosie.” A spasm crossed her face, swiftly subdued. “The smell of blood. It seemed to choke the air. The cobblestones were sticky with it.”

  He dropped down beside the settle. “Did you find Rosie?”

  “Yes.” She put the cup on the settle beside her. The coffee sloshed over the rim and dripped unheeded onto the floorboards. “They’d thrown her against some sacks in an alley. She was only eight years old. She—” For a moment Mélanie’s voice cracked and her face crumpled. “I tried to stop the bleeding but it just kept coming. So much of it.”

  He took her hand and clasped it between his own. She didn’t look at him, but her fingers tightened round his. “She wasn’t unconscious at first. She looked at me as if I could make her better. Such trust. I kept telling her she was going to be all right. I could lie very convincingly, even then.”

  “Mel—”

  “It’s her face I usually see in the nightmares. Tonight her face kept changing into Colin’s. She was only two years older than he is. Just a little girl.”

  He sat back on his heels, still holding her hand, and watched her in the cool predawn light and the warm glow of the fire. “So were you.”

  “No. By the end of that day I wasn’t a child anymore.”

  He stroked his thumb over her fingers. For the moment, her story left no room in him for anything but tenderness. “It was my countrymen who did this.”

  Her shoulders curled inward, pulling at the seams of her gown. “It was war. I saw every side, every faction of every side, commit atrocities just as vile. And yet—I admit I still can’t look at a British uniform without seeing my father with his brains spilling onto the cobblestones and my sister violated and bleeding to death. Without remembering how it felt to have my own body invaded and torn asunder. It was British soldiers who first taught me the meaning of fear and hatred.”

  He turned her wrist over. In the gap where a corded loop fastened the button on her cuff, he could see the corner of a scar, a scar that he had known was there but had never asked her about. He looked up at her, a question in his eyes.

  She shook her head. “No, that was later. I was posing as a Spanish peasant girl to try to infiltrate a group of guerrilleros, but they saw through my ruse. They had some interesting ways of trying to get me to talk before Raoul managed to get me out.”

  Her words were calm. The images that went with them were not. Charles looked into the fire, contemplating the leap from orphaned fifteen-year-old to French agent. “What did you do after Rosie died?”

  She picked up the coffee with her free hand and blew on the steam. “Half the people in the village were killed, and nearly all the houses burned to the ground. At least five of the theater company were killed. Two were too badly wounded to be moved. The rest fled. After the dead were buried, most of the villagers left to find shelter with friends or relations. A family who were going into the mountains took me with them as far as Léon. My parents had friends in the city. I found their house but it was empty. Later I learned that they’d fled to the north. The people I’d traveled with were already gone.”

  “And you were left alone in a strange city. A fifteen-year-old child.”

  A tremor ran through her. The firelight made bands of light and shadow out of the satin piping on her skirt. “I survived on the streets for a while. If you can call it surviving. I was lucky if I ate two days out of the week. I got passably good at picking pockets, but one day I was caught. My victim said I was too pretty for prison and he might be able to find me employment. I knew what he meant. To own the truth, I was relieved.”

  He looked down at the hand clasped in his, the smooth rounded nails, the delicate fingers, the porcelain skin that smelled of roses and vanilla. He thought of his own childhood. His parents had been only erratic presences, and tutors and governesses had come and gone with depressing regularity. But he and his brother and sister had taken it for granted that they would always have their rambling, centuries-old house to live in, with a fire and wax candles in the schoolroom in the bargain. Whatever emotional deprivations they had suffered, they had never questioned that ample meals would be set before them each day on the second-best Spode china. “Food and a roof over your head must have seemed a promise of heaven,” he said.

  “Yes.” She tried to slide her hand out of his, but he kept hold of it. “It could have been worse,” she said after a moment. “I think it was a bit cleaner than the Gilded Lily. But I’d been a better pickpocket than I was a whore. My acting skills had a tiresome tendency to desert me in the bedchamber. At least then. I was too young.”

  She fell silent, her gaze frozen, as though to look at him was too great a risk, even for her. He remembered his words that morning in the Cantabrian Mountains. I’d like to kill them for you. Even that seemed inadequate now.

  He lifted her hand to his lips and held it there for a moment. She turned her gaze to him and read his thoughts as she so often did. “Many women face as much and more.”

  “Most of the world lives in squalor. That doesn’t lessen the horror. Or it shouldn’t.” He laced his fingers through her own. “No wonder you jumped at the chance when O’Roarke found you.”

  “He was the first man in all the months I’d been in the brothel who looked at me like I was a person. It was amazingly seductive. He asked me questions about myself. He learned I’d been an actress. He talked to me about the war. After a few visits, he too offered me employment.”

  “A chance at vengeance.”

  “In part.” Her brows drew together, sooty smudges against her parchment-white skin. “But it’s too simple to reduce it to that. He gave me something to believe in beyond survival. He reminded me of Rousseau and Thomas Paine and William Godwin—all the ideas I’d been raised on.”

  “He could hardly have turned you loose as a spy with nothing but Rousseau and Paine and Godwin to guide you.”

  “Hardly. He showed me how to wield a knife and fire a gun and pick a lock. He taught me to create a cover story and stick with it. He made sure I could manage the right accent to pass myself off as a native of any part of Spain or France. He drilled me on army ranks and court protocol.” She paused a moment. “And after he took me out of the brothel, he didn’t touch me again until I asked him to.”

  “If he cared a scrap for you, why the hell didn’t he—”

  “Send me off somewhere safe? I’d have gone mad, darling. I didn’t want to be safe. I wanted to fight.”

  “You could have been killed.”

  “So could you, any number of times during the war.” She touched her fingers to his hair. “Raoul and I saw a chance to remake the world. You may disagree with our methods, but you of all people should agree that it needs remaking.”

  “Oh, yes. The question is, into what?”

  She was silent for a moment. “My father never forgave Napoleon for crowning himself emperor. But when the French moved into Spain, he thought Joseph Bonaparte’s regime offered all sorts of promise.” She scanned his face with a familiar challenge. “Can you really claim Spain wouldn’t be better off now if we’d won?”

  “No. You’ve heard me say as much. And yet many Spaniards hated the monarchy but also wanted the French the hell out of their country.”

  “A palpable hit, dearest. Those same Spaniards were naïve enough to think Britain would support their bid for freedom when the French were gone.”

  “A far more palpable hit, wife.” He realized, belatedly, what he had called her. He looked down at their intertwined hands. “That was what kept you going all those years? A dream of freedom?”

  “Oh, no, darling.” An edge hardened her voice. “I’m neithe
r so naïve nor so saintly. Part of it was the pure love of the game—the challenge of a new gambit, the thrill of becoming another character, the sheer bloody exhilaration of being able to pull off a deception. You must have felt that yourself.”

  He started to voice a denial, then forced his mind back to his days in the Peninsula and later in Vienna and Brussels. He could taste the wine-sweet rush of triumph on his tongue even now. Triumph at passing himself off as a French staff officer, at breaking a code that was supposed to be unbreakable, at rescuing two of his men from a mud hut that was an excuse for a prison without a shot being fired. “Yes,” he said. “Far more often than I’d like to admit.”

  Her gaze moved over his face, as though it was important that she make him understand. “You build up a shell. You become so caught up in the rules of the game that you quite lose track of the outer edges. You forget that you were playing the game for a reason. And then suddenly you remember and you wonder if that reason can survive when you’ve worn your own integrity to shreds.”

  He thought of her reasons for playing the game and wondered how his own held up in comparison. “Can it?” he said.

  She shook her head. Her gaze at once held rueful regret and stark torment. “Oh, darling, if I knew the answer to that—”

  They sat in silence. A curious peace had settled over the room, the peace of an unexpected, tentative balance. Still holding his wife’s hand, Charles looked into the leaping flames and tried to recast their past yet again in the light of her revelations. Those revelations certainly made clearer the steps that had brought her to the moment she agreed to be his wife. Did they excuse her actions? Mélanie wouldn’t thank him for saying so. He could almost hear her telling him not to dare deny her the free will to be responsible for her own actions. Beneath the dazzling charm, she was every bit as uncompromising as he was himself. And yet—With her words echoing in his head, he could not feel the anger he had before.