Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  Velasquez stared at him as though he couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. Two men at the table next to them began to argue with the waiter about the reckoning, claiming the wine had been watered.

  “Good God, Fraser,” Velasquez said. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “I didn’t think you’d have much sympathy for a child of mine.”

  “I’d have sympathy for a child, whoever fathered it. I’m a parent myself now. Christ, if things had been different your son might also have been—”

  He couldn’t put it into words. Charles could. “Kitty’s child.”

  Velasquez swallowed. “You haven’t found the ring?”

  “We haven’t found it. I suspect it isn’t in the house at all.” Charles sat back in his chair. “How did you track Helen Trevennen? Did you follow us?”

  “Yes, though it was only with the devil’s own luck.” Velasquez frowned. “It’s a bit strong to say I tried to have you killed. Did you say something about an attack with a horse?”

  “You needn’t try to deny it now, Velasquez. It’s hardly worse than what you’ve admitted doing to Helen Trevennen.”

  Velasquez reached for his tankard, but seemed too exhausted to lift it to his lips. “Fraser, I’m in no fit state to deny anything or I wouldn’t have admitted what I have. I engaged one of the stagehands at the Drury Lane to let me know if anyone came asking questions about Helen Trevennen.”

  “So you followed us to the Marshalsea and stuck a knife in Mélanie’s ribs.”

  “Knife?” Velasquez thunked his tankard down on the table. A horror that appeared genuine filled his eyes. “See here, Fraser, I wasn’t at the Marshalsea until well after you left. That rascal Trevennen wouldn’t tell me anything, but the porter remembered that Miss Trevennen had a sister who worked at the Gilded Lily.”

  “Where you did see us,” Charles said. “And paid someone to start a fight and try to break my arm.”

  Velasquez flushed. “I didn’t tell him to break your arm. But I had to do something to get you away from Susan Trevennen.”

  “And when you had got us away from her?” Mélanie said. “Wasn’t it a bit excessive to have a sniper shoot Charles in the street outside?”

  “A sniper?” Velasquez blinked, as though he had lost his ability to focus. “Why would I do that? I wanted you as far away from the Gilded Lily as possible.”

  Charles folded his arms across his chest. It was precisely what he had wondered at the time. “And then?” he said.

  Velasquez picked up the tankard. It tilted in his hands as though he’d lost the ability to command his fingers. “After the brawl died down I managed to speak to Susan Trevennen, but she claimed she hadn’t seen her sister in ten years. Was she how you found Mrs.—” He took a long swallow from the tankard and choked. Ale dribbled out of his mouth. “Mrs. Constable?”

  “In a roundabout manner. What did you do after you left the Gilded Lily?”

  “Tried to pick up your trail, but I couldn’t discover where you’d gone.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  Velasquez returned the tankard to the table, sloshing the ale over the side. “So I hired a lad to watch Berkeley Square until you returned. He sent word to me this evening. I followed you when you left the house, but I lost you when you changed hackneys the second time. I was just wandering about when I caught a glimpse of you on foot crossing Russell Street. I couldn’t believe my luck.”

  “Nor can I.”

  “I could tell from your demeanor when you came out that you didn’t have the ring. I assumed it was no use my trying to buy it from her if you’d failed. So I went round to the back, waited till the house quieted down, and—” He stared at the table. “You know the rest.”

  Charles sat back and studied him. The difficulty, as he had said to Mélanie, was to recognize the truth when you saw it. Velasquez was not good at dissimulation, particularly not when he was in his cups. His eyes were bloodshot, his face raw with shame and guilt, his skin slack with drink and exhaustion. “Bow Street know we suspect you in Mrs. Constable’s death. We’ll have to tell them the whole story when we talk to them, but you should have an hour or so to decide what you’re going to do.”

  Velasquez straightened his shoulders, as though with an effort. “That’s more courtesy than I’d have afforded you, Fraser.”

  Charles looked into Velasquez’s eyes. They were the same unexpected green as Kitty’s. “For what it’s worth, I know something about how it feels to have a death on one’s conscience.”

  Velasquez’s eyes narrowed. The past reverberated against the smoke-blackened tavern walls. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Not directly. But if it wasn’t for me, Kitty would still be alive.” Charles pushed back his chair.

  “Fraser,” Velasquez said, as Charles helped Mélanie to her feet.

  “Yes?”

  Velasquez drew a breath. “I don’t know why the hell I’m telling you this. I called you a lot of names in our last private conversation. I still believe most of them are true. I still think that if it wasn’t for you, Kitty would be alive today. But perhaps she shouldn’t be quite as much on your conscience as she is.”

  The room seemed to rush away round him. He felt Mélanie go still. “Why?” he said.

  Velasquez stared at the tabletop for a moment. Then he pushed himself to his feet and looked Charles in the eye. “I was the one who found Kitty in the stream. When I first pulled her body out, all I could think was that she must have thrown herself off the footbridge. I knew the despair she’d been in. I knew I had to make it look like an accident to protect her honor. But later, thinking back—the way her dress was torn, the marks on her neck—” He gripped the edge of the table with both hands. “I think it’s possible she didn’t jump from the bridge, Fraser. I think she may have been pushed.”

  Chapter 31

  M élanie saw a tumult of feeling rush across her husband’s face. The slosh of ale and the clatter of cutlery drifted through the tavern. Someone was tossing dice. Someone else hummed a fragment of “Over the Hills and Far Away.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Charles said at last.

  “I know.” Velasquez stood still and alert despite the weariness in his face. “I’d have sworn Kitty didn’t have any enemies. Of course, I’d also have sworn she didn’t have a lover.” He drew a breath, then glanced down at the table. “Her husband was away. You weren’t there. When I challenged you, I still half believed it was suicide because I couldn’t make sense of any other scenario. And because I wanted you to believe it. Because I wanted you to suffer. I thought you deserved to suffer.” He looked up at Charles again, his bloodshot eyes hard as a musket barrel. “You did deserve to suffer.”

  “Granted.” Charles’s face was set with intensity. “You’re sure it isn’t just that you couldn’t face that she’d killed herself?”

  “Every moment of that night is etched into my memory. I don’t see how she could have come by those marks or the damage to her gown without another person being involved.” Velasquez’s hand curled into a fist. “I’d give a great deal to know whom.”

  “So would I,” Charles said.

  The two men looked at each other for a moment, a whiff of understanding between them. “Thank you, Velasquez,” Charles said. “I appreciate your confidence.”

  Velasquez inclined his head, a stiff, soldier’s nod. Then he frowned. “It’s odd, you know. He was there that night. The night Kitty died.”

  “Who?”

  “Lieutenant Jennings. But I daresay it’s just coincidence. He scarcely knew Kitty.”

  “It’s still possible the ring is in the Constable house,” Charles said when he and Mélanie had left the smoky warmth of the tavern for the crisp bite of the street. “We could find Roth and arrange a search of the house.”

  “But by the time we explain the story and Mr. Constable is persuaded to go along with the search, it could take hours.”

  “My though
ts exactly. And my instinct says the ring isn’t in the house.”

  “Mine, too.” Mélanie fingered the silk braid that edged her cloak. “Charles, suppose she didn’t take it to Brighton with her at all?”

  Two young men in coats with absurdly padded shoulders staggered out of the tavern, shouting for a hackney. Charles took Mélanie’s arm and began to walk along the pavement. “What makes you think she didn’t take the ring with her?”

  “Her departure for Brighton seems to have been triggered by the arrival of Jennings’s letter and the ring. When she left she seemed to think she could be in danger if she stayed in London. As you pointed out, her refusal to give up the ring today implies that she feared grave consequences if she did so. The woman used to carry a pistol in her reticule. Perhaps she still did. We know she slept with a gun in her night table—either she had it there always or she put it there tonight because she feared we’d come after the ring. Whatever the truth of it, she was frightened, and she wasn’t a woman who frightened easily. It looks to me as though her fear was connected with the ring, though I can’t begin to think how. But if the ring was important yet potentially dangerous, I think I’d have hidden it rather than taking it to Brighton with me.”

  “Well reasoned, Mel.” Charles swung round to look at her in the glow of a street lamp. His face was still drawn, but his eyes had the light of the chase. “She had little more than twenty-four hours between the arrival of Jennings’s letter and her own departure. She performed at the Drury Lane, she went to a tavern with Violet Goddard, she—”

  “Sought out Jemmy Moore.”

  “Who seems to have meant more to her than anyone.” Charles glanced up and down the street and flagged down a passing hackney before the inebriated young men by the tavern could commandeer it. “Jemmy Moore should be at Mannerling’s at this hour. We can collect Edgar from the Albany on the way. If we can’t learn anything from Moore, we’ll see what progress Roth has made at the Constable house.”

  It was only when they were in the hackney that she said, “Velasquez was quite convincing when he claimed not to have been behind the attacks.”

  “Quite.”

  Without looking at him, she continued, “Raoul was convincing as well, but he’s a better actor.”

  Charles turned his head toward her. “An admission. I’m impressed.”

  “Raoul always said I’d make a better agent if I was quicker to admit I was wrong.” The threat of betraying tears pulled at her face. Raoul O’Roarke and their cause had been the center of her life. She had always known his greatest loyalty wasn’t to her and never would be. But she had trusted him far more than she would admit, even to herself. Yet another weakness. “I don’t trust my judgment of anyone anymore,” she said.

  “I know the feeling.” To her surprise, Charles’s voice was more gentle than bitter. He was silent for a moment. “Oddly enough, after that last scene I’m less inclined to suspect O’Roarke.”

  His words eased the knot of fear inside her. “Then you think Velasquez is lying about not being behind the attacks?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She reached for the carriage strap as they rounded a corner. “The incident with the horse might have been an accident, but the rifle shot and the knife in my ribs certainly weren’t.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t suppose someone else could be after the ring?”

  She couldn’t see Charles’s face, but she could imagine him scowling in frustrated concentration. “It’s mad, but it’s the only alternative I can see to O’Roarke or Velasquez.”

  “Charles.” She hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she should ask, but this would be their last chance to talk alone for God knew how long. “Can you think of anyone who might have killed Kitty?”

  For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. “No.” His voice was rougher than it had been.

  “What about the rest of her family? Suppose they’d found out about the pregnancy and couldn’t bear the scandal?”

  “None of them were in Lisbon. Her mother had died a few years before. Her father was in the country. Both her brothers were off fighting.”

  “A fellow officer of her husband’s who’d learned the truth?”

  “Possibly, but I can’t imagine how anyone would have learned it. Velasquez only knew because Kitty told him.”

  Mélanie pictured the winding paths in the embassy garden where Kitty Ashford had met her death, the curving footbridge, the rushing stream below. “Perhaps she stumbled across something in the garden that she wasn’t supposed to see?”

  “You think someone killed her because she witnessed an amorous intrigue?”

  “If the stakes were high enough, I suppose it’s possible. But there were a lot of intrigues in Lisbon that weren’t amorous.”

  “Espionage?” Charles reached across the carriage and gripped her wrist. “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing, darling, I swear it. I’m only speculating. I don’t know much about what was happening in Lisbon before I came there.”

  He slackened his grip on her wrist. To her surprise, he laced his fingers through her own and let their clasped hands rest on the worn leather of the seat. “I admit I’d very much like to find out. But it’s of little urgency beside the ring.”

  “No. Unless—” The pieces of information sifted through her brain. “Unless it’s not coincidence that Jennings was at the embassy that night.”

  “Jennings would have had no reason to kill Kitty. Velasquez was right, he scarcely knew her. Oh, I see.” She felt his sudden alertness. “The blackmail.”

  “Suppose Jennings witnessed Kitty’s murder. Murder’s a secret a lot of people would pay to conceal.”

  “And Jennings wrote to Helen Trevennen about it and she took up the blackmail. Possible, I suppose. I wonder—” His fingers tensed round her own, then relaxed. “Even if that were true, it still doesn’t take us to the ring. Which at present is all that matters.”

  They had the hackney wait while they went into the Albany. They found Edgar pacing the carpet in Velasquez’s sitting room. On the drive to Mannerling’s, Charles gave the details of their talk with Velasquez and their conclusions about the ring. He made no mention of Velasquez’s revelations about Kitty’s death, and he glossed over the visit to Raoul. Edgar didn’t press him for details.

  Mélanie could feel her brother-in-law trying to sort through the morass of new information. “It doesn’t make any sense that she’d be afraid of the ring,” he said.

  “No sense at all,” Mélanie agreed. “Except that it’s the only theory that makes sense of her actions.”

  Charles was sitting very still. “We can’t tell Jemmy Moore she’s dead.”

  “Good God, Charles.” Edgar straightened up with a jerk. “Don’t you think he deserves to know?”

  “Undoubtedly. I suspect the news will hit him as hard as it did Mr. Constable. But he’d want to run off and take his revenge. We wouldn’t get anything coherent out of him.” Charles paused a moment, glanced at Mélanie, then added, “Lying’s not pleasant, but at times it’s necessary.”

  At Mannerling’s, the porter frowned at them through the eyehole, then slid the bolt back with a grudging scrape. “Mr. Morningham,” Charles said, handing over his cloak and hat. “Is he here tonight?”

  The porter’s scowl deepened. He cast a pointed glance up the stairs at the broken section of balustrade. It had been closed off with a red velvet rope.

  “We merely have a question to put to him,” Charles said. “We promise not to brawl.”

  The porter moved to Mélanie and took her cloak from her shoulders. His hands were stiff. “Upstairs. Try the faro bank.”

  Jemmy Moore spotted them as they came into the long room with the faro table. Instead of running away, he came toward them. “Did you find her?” he asked as they met in the center of the room. He made no attempt to keep the eagerness from his voice.

  “Not yet, I’m afraid.” When called upon to
do so, Charles could lie with as much conviction as Mélanie herself could. “Could you spare us a moment? Perhaps we could go into the supper room?”

  “Of course.” Moore squared his shoulders and offered his arm to Mélanie.

  “Mr. Moore,” Mélanie said when they were clustered round one of the small tables near the supper buffet, “the last time you saw Miss Trevennen, did she give you anything to keep for her?”

  “What?” Moore scratched his head. “Oh, you think she might have given me this ring you’re looking for? Sorry. I doubt Nelly had so much trust in me.”

  “Did she say anything else about where she’d been that day?” Charles asked.

  Moore frowned into his glass of champagne. “She’d obviously been to the theater—she still had some of her makeup on. We—ah—we didn’t actually do that much talking.”

  “Of course.” Mélanie smiled at him. “How else does one say farewell to a lover?”

  Moore returned the smile. It was, it seemed, a happy memory. She was glad he had some of them. “In the morning she told me she was leaving and I—Well, I told you about the conversation. I wasn’t thinking very clearly, I’m afraid, because it was so damned early. She said she had to get up so she could be at the Marshalsea to visit her uncle when the gates opened.”

  Mélanie felt her shoulders jerk. “She was going to visit her uncle before she left?”

  “Yes. Wanted to say good-bye, I suppose. More consideration than she usually gave the old boy.”

  Edgar glanced from Mélanie to Charles. “Nothing so very odd in that.”

  “Except that according to Trevennen she never actually did say good-bye. She asked Violet Goddard to tell him she’d left London.” Charles looked at Mélanie, eyes alight.

  Moore frowned. “You mean Nelly didn’t visit him after all? She seemed quite set on it when she left my rooms.”