by Tracy Grant
“Right, sir.” Addison handed them their shoes and cloaks, which they had removed before they broke into the house. “You’re going to see Mr. Velasquez?”
“To begin with.”
Mélanie and Charles put their shoes back on and wrapped their cloaks round their shoulders, and then they and Edgar found a hackney and directed it to the Albany, where Velasquez had rooms. When they were settled inside the carriage, it was Edgar who broke the thick silence. “Did Constable see your face?”
“He saw Mélanie’s. I’m not sure about me.”
“He’ll think—”
“It can’t be helped. Roth will sort things out. Poor bastard. First his wife died. Now he’s going to have to learn far more about her than he ever wanted to know.”
Mélanie tried to read her husband’s expression in the dark of the carriage. His features were armored to reveal nothing. She wondered what would be worse for Mr. Constable, losing his wife or learning she had lied to him about everything in her past.
They turned off Piccadilly and pulled up in the forecourt of the Albany, a Palladian building of brown stone, once the home of the Duke of York, now transformed into bachelor’s chambers. Lord Byron had lodged there, as had Charles himself in a brief interval between Oxford and Lisbon. The porter, who remembered Charles, directed them to Velasquez’s flat, where they were greeted by a manservant in dressing gown and cap who said that his master had not been home since morning.
Charles seized the manservant’s arm. “Where is he?”
The manservant stared at him out of sleep-flushed eyes. “I don’t know, sir. But he’ll have to return before morning. There are papers here that are needed at the embassy.”
Charles slackened his hold. “We’ll wait.”
The manservant started to protest.
“You can go back to bed,” Charles told him. “We require no attention.”
The manservant hesitated, but Charles’s ducal voice won out. The manservant fussed about the fire, made an offer of tea, which they refused, and returned to his own chamber.
They were left alone in a small sitting room where Spanish silver candlesticks and a tooled leather chest jostled side by side with English walnut furniture. Mélanie glanced at the mantel clock. Ten minutes past one in the morning. It was already Thursday. Less than three days until Carevalo’s deadline. She perched on the edge of a ruby velvet chair and rubbed her arms. The image of the doll with yellow yarn hair danced before her eyes. Beneath the numb aftermath of the crisis, reality gnawed at her insides. “Two children lost their mother tonight.”
Edgar turned to look at her. He had found the decanters and was helping himself to a large brandy. “Because of us, you mean?”
“No.” Charles was prowling about the room. “Because Helen Trevennen was playing a dangerous and foolish game. Though what exactly that game was—” He brought his fist down on the mantel.
Edgar downed a quarter of the brandy. “We can’t be sure Velasquez has the ring.”
“On the contrary.” Charles drummed his fingers on the plaster. “There’s a good chance he doesn’t have it. He tore those rooms apart. If he found it, it must have been in the last place he searched.”
“Charles.” Edgar looked at his brother across the room. His gaze had an intensity that took Mélanie by surprise. “Are you sure Raoul O’Roarke is merely an innocent emissary in all of this?”
Charles rested his foot on the fender. “I’m sure of nothing, especially not where O’Roarke is concerned. Why?”
Edgar scowled, swallowed the rest of his brandy, refilled the glass, and took a turn about the room. “It oughtn’t to have anything to do with this. I can’t see how it could possibly have anything to do with this. I’ve been telling myself that since yesterday. But—”
“Edgar.” Charles crossed the room in two strides and seized his brother by the shoulders. “This is no time to be making judgments on your own. If there’s the remotest connection to Colin, you have to tell us.”
Edgar’s brows contracted. “It’s not that simple, brother.”
“It’s just that simple, as Mélanie said to me last night.” Charles’s fingers bit into the black cassimere of Edgar’s borrowed coat. “Scruples are nothing next to Colin’s safety.”
“It’s not just scruples, it’s—”
Charles slackened his grip. His mouth lifted in one of his warming half-smiles. “All I’m asking for is the truth of whatever it is.”
“The truth. Jesus.” Edgar tore away from Charles and stared at the dark red folds of the curtains. The lamplight shimmered against the velvet. “Be careful what you ask for, Charles.”
Charles’s gaze drilled into the back of his brother’s head. “Edgar, I haven’t got the least idea what you’re getting at, but after everything else that’s happened, I don’t see what you could possibly have to say that I couldn’t take in stride.”
Edgar crossed to the table where he had left his brandy glass. “You were right. The talk about Kitty—Mrs. Ashford. About her death. It did remind me of Mother.”
Mélanie, who had been doing her best to fade into the chair, stared at her brother-in-law at this non sequitur. So did Charles, but he made no comment other than a neutral “Go on.”
Edgar took a swallow of brandy. “And you were right that I’ve avoided talking about Mother’s death. I didn’t…She talked to me before, you see.”
“Before she killed herself?”
“Yes. I’d got to Scotland a few days earlier. You were still at Oxford and Father was in London—you know that. Gisèle was in the schoolroom, of course, she was only eight. Mother was in one of her black moods. I’d scarcely seen her since I’d arrived. But that evening she sought me out after dinner. In the billiard room. She said she had to talk to me.”
His face twisted. Mélanie understood. She knew all too well the horror of the moment when you opened the door onto the ugliness of the past and forced yourself to go through. The first step over the threshold was always the hardest.
Charles stood absolutely still, yet his body hummed with intensity. “And?”
“We went into the library. She poured us both—brandy.” Edgar looked down at the glass in his hand and set it on the nearest table, as though it burned him. “She said she had to tell someone and you weren’t there and Gisèle was too young so it would have to be me. She said it was important that we understand.”
The words trailed off. Mélanie had the sense that they’d got stuck somewhere between his brain and his lips.
“Understand what?” Charles said.
“She and Father…” Edgar’s gaze fastened on the plaster garlands on the mantel, as though they were a refuge. “You said it yourself this afternoon. Neither of them was faithful. I’m not sure which of them strayed first or how soon—”
Charles’s brows lifted. “From the moment of the betrothal, I should think, at least in Father’s case.”
“Yes. And Mother…she must have followed suit not long after the marriage, because she told me—” Edgar walked forward and gripped the mantel with both hands.
Silence stretched through the room, punctuated by the rattle of wheels in the forecourt outside and the crackle of the coal in the grate. “Edgar, are you trying to tell me I’m a bastard?” Charles said.
Edgar whirled round and stared at him. “Doesn’t it bother you?”
Charles ran his fingers through his hair. “Not a great deal. To own the truth, I’ve wondered for years, and I’ve been fairly certain since Father died. It explains much of his attitude toward me. I take it he knew?”
“Suspected, I think, the way Mother described it.”
“Of course he didn’t treat you much better. Unless—no, you’ve got the Fraser profile.” Charles studied his brother. “Why didn’t you tell me years ago?”
Edgar straightened his shoulders, as though facing up to an accusation. “I didn’t see any reason to burden you with it.”
“That was thoughtful if misguided.�
�� Charles’s voice had that rare, stripped-to-the-bone gentleness it sometimes took on. “And no doubt a strain. No wonder you pulled away from me. In your place I’d have felt a share of jealousy. Everything I inherited—the estates, the Berkeley Square house, the Italian villa—should have been yours.”
Edgar flushed. “Charles—”
Charles moved to a chair and perched on its arm. “If you didn’t feel jealous, you’re more of a saint than I am.”
“I’m no saint. I—Yes, all right, I was jealous. A bit.” Edgar glanced at his top boots. “Maybe more than a bit at times.”
Charles’s eyes narrowed. “Did Mother tell you all this because she’d decided to kill herself?”
“I think so, yes, though of course I didn’t know it at the time. I was shocked. How could I have been otherwise? I ran from the room. I heard a shot behind me. When I went back—”
He turned his head away. The firelight caught the sparkle of tears on his cheeks. Charles got to his feet, walked forward, and clapped a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “Did it ever occur to you that learning Kenneth Fraser wasn’t my father would hurt me much less than losing my brother?”
Edgar looked at him with the pained expression of one struggling to find a clear path across shifting sands. “I never meant for you to…You’ll always be my brother, Charles.”
“I’m relieved to hear it.” Charles’s fingers tightened on Edgar’s shoulder for a moment. Then he pulled Edgar to him and put his hand behind Edgar’s head, the way he did with Colin. He held his brother for a long moment before he stood back. Mélanie felt the prickle of tears on her own cheeks. “It shouldn’t really matter,” Charles said, “but did she happen to tell you who my father is?”
Edgar’s face drained of color, but Mélanie was ahead of him. A second or so before, an idle part of her brain had linked up his story with the seemingly incongruous questions that had prefaced it. A horrid suspicion she could not quite articulate, even to herself, grew in her mind. She gripped the arms of her chair to keep from leaping out of it.
“That’s just it.” Edgar stared into Charles’s eyes, as though seeking a humane way to deliver a killing blow. “Why I had to tell you. Can’t you guess like you guess everything else? Mother spent half her time in Ireland in those days. He was a handsome devil. Still is, come to that.”
“He?” Charles said.
“Raoul O’Roarke.”
Chapter 30
T he words reverberated in Charles’s head. He looked at his brother for a long moment. Then he turned on his wife. All the blood had drained from her face. He stared into the broken glass of her eyes while the pieces of his life once more disintegrated and re-formed round him.
He grabbed Mélanie by the wrist. “Edgar, wait for Velasquez. Use whatever threats it takes.”
“But—”
“If Velasquez gets back before we do, wait here for us. If some emergency forces you to depart, leave word with the porter.”
“Where are you going?”
Charles jerked open the door. “To act on your information and find out what the hell else O’Roarke is hiding.”
He pulled Mélanie into the corridor, down the stairs, across the columned portico, and into the forecourt. Two young men in evening cloaks and silk hats were staggering out of a hackney. Charles bundled Mélanie into the hackney, directed the driver to Raoul O’Roarke’s hotel, and sat back against the squabs. “Did you know about this?”
“No.” A single word, low and numb.
“Mélanie.”
“I’m not that good an actress, Charles.” Her voice shook like a sail battered by a storm. “I can’t believe it’s true.”
“I fail to see why Edgar would have made it up.” He stared into the gloom of the hackney, his vision filled with memories. A cold, chill morning, horses stamping their feet, liveried servants with sherry, ladies in velvet habits, gentlemen in hunting jackets and riding boots. His mother, eyes brilliant with life, tossed into the saddle by O’Roarke. An evening party, hanging over the stair rail with Edgar, his mother and O’Roarke crossing the hall below, his dark head bent close to her golden hair. Coming upon them once, walking together by the lake, her gloved fingers curled round O’Roarke’s arm.
Innocent enough memories. She had flirted as much or more with a score of men. But the images were suggestive seen through the glass of Edgar’s revelations. “It has a certain internal logic,” he said. “Mother spent a great deal of time on Grandfather’s Irish estates and O’Roarke would have been at university in Dublin about the time I was conceived. She had a fondness for dark intense types.”
He felt Mélanie’s gaze fasten on him. “The eyes. I should have seen it.”
“What?”
“You have Raoul’s eyes. When you were pacing yesterday you reminded me of him, but I never guessed—”
“It would have been rather beyond even your powers of gathering information, mo chridh.”
“He lied to me.” The words contained a raw pain that Charles knew all too well. “Even when—”
“Even when you were intimate? Yes, it’s rather a nasty realization, isn’t it?”
She sucked in her breath. “I already knew how despicable such lies are, darling.”
“Do you still think O’Roarke knows nothing more about Colin’s disappearance?”
“At the moment I can’t be sure what I think about anything. All of this may have nothing to do with Colin.” Her breath caught, as though she had been dealt a fresh blow. “Except that it means Colin is—”
“My brother.”
“Charles—Dearest—”
“I always told Edgar our family are a direct descendant of the House of Atreus. I never realized how spot on I was. No, I’m wrong.” His voice cracked. It seemed to have slipped beyond his control. “Clytemnestra slept with a pair of brothers.”
“Cousins.” Mélanie’s own voice was harsh and unsteady. “Aegisthus was Agamemnon’s cousin.”
“So he was. There must be some mythological heroine who slept with a father and son. Damnable how a classical education deserts one just when it would come in handy.”
“Phèdre. But she didn’t sleep with the son, she only lusted after him. And no, I never played her. I was too young, and my father didn’t care for Racine.”
“Pity. You’d have been good at it.” He put his hands over his face. “Jesus. Sweet, bloody Jesus. I don’t know—” He drew a breath. His chest hurt as though it had been pummeled black and blue. “Colin will always be my son, before anything else. Nothing can change that.”
He said nothing more for the rest of the drive, and she followed suit. They went straight to O’Roarke’s suite. Charles shouldered past O’Roarke’s manservant even more roughly than he had Velasquez’s. They waited in the sitting room by the light of a single lamp. A few moments later O’Roarke came in, carelessly wrapped in his dressing gown, with no shirt beneath it, his hair standing on end.
He cast one quick look from Mélanie to Charles. “What’s happened? Is it the boy?”
Charles heard Mélanie draw in her breath, then deliberately check herself and cede the reply to him. “Not directly,” he said. “That is, we’re here to find out how it concerns Colin. My brother just told me that you’re my father.”
O’Roarke’s eyes widened in rare surprise. He swallowed once, started to speak, bit back the words. He smoothed his hand over his hair, scraping it back from his temples. “I didn’t realize Captain Fraser knew.”
Charles studied the bony, ascetic face, searching for an echo of himself. “It’s true, then?”
“Oh, yes.” O’Roarke moved to the fireplace and stirred the banked coals. “At least your mother led me to believe so. And I’ve always fancied I could see something of myself in you.”
Charles crossed the room in two strides, seized O’Roarke by the arm, and pushed him into a wing chair. “You sick bastard, how long had you been planning this?”
O’Roarke met his gaze without shying
away. “I didn’t plan it at all.”
“No? You just happened to get Mélanie pregnant and then married her off to your son?” Charles gripped the arms of the chair and leaned over O’Roarke. “I don’t give a damn about my own birth, but I want to know what this means for Colin.”
“Believe it or not it has nothing to do with Colin. Save that—” O’Roarke drew a breath. “Having watched over you from your birth—albeit often from a distance—I knew I could trust you with Mélanie and her baby.”
“Don’t.” Charles tightened his grip on the chair arms until he could feel the damask give way beneath his fingers. “I may be the most gullible fool since Malvolio, but don’t expect me to believe you wasted one minute thinking about Mélanie and the baby.”
“I don’t expect you to believe anything, Fraser. But it happens to be the truth.”
“You set Mélanie to spy on me.”
“Loyalty is always a matter of choices. Surely a career in diplomacy and politics has taught you that.”
“Your only loyalty is to yourself, O’Roarke.” Charles drew back and stared into the gray eyes Mélanie had said were like his own, seeking answers. Throttling the man would be satisfying but would get him nowhere.
Mélanie was staring at O’Roarke. “How could you?” Her sterling and crystal tones gave way to the scrape of iron and rock. “I was carrying your child. Our child. How could you marry me off to your son and not tell me?”
O’Roarke looked past Charles at her. “It would have created unnecessary complications.”
She walked up to him and slapped him hard across the face. “My God, Raoul, you were playing games with all of us from the first.”
He took the slap without flinching. “But of course. I never pretended otherwise, querida. Though the stakes in this particular game were the future of a country.” He regarded her for a moment, then got to his feet, walked to a table where decanters were set out, and filled three glasses half full of whisky.
