Beneath a Silent Moon

‘WHAT?’ David sprang to his feet, knocking over the three-legged table that held the spirit lamp and teakettle.

Simon grabbed the lamp before it could start a fire and threw a sheet over the spilled tea.

‘You’re sure he said Honoria?’ Charles asked Manon.

‘Yes.’ She looked at David. ‘Is she your sister?’

‘My cousin.’ David ran a hand over his hair. ‘She’s just become betrothed to Charles’s father.’

‘Nom de Dieu.’ Manon’s gaze flickered between Charles and David.

‘But the betrothal was only announced the night before last,’ Charles said. ‘When did Francisco mention Honoria?’

‘The night we left Paris. Less than a fortnight ago.’ She shook her head as though she could not believe how much had happened in that span of time.

Charles turned to David. ‘When did Father offer for Honoria?’

‘A week since. At least that’s when my father heard of it.’

Mélanie looked at Charles. ‘Francisco’s last words—’

‘Yes. ‘It all comes down to honor.’ I should have known he wasn’t talking about ‘honor’ as a concept. That wasn’t Francisco at all. He was trying to say a name. ‘It all comes down to Honoria.’ ‘

David frowned. ‘But—’

A knock sounded on the door. Fear ran through the room like a palpable current.

‘It’s all right, it’s only me.’ A woman opened the door and stepped into the room with proprietary ease. She wore a stylish chip straw bonnet over her glossy auburn ringlets, and her figured muslin gown was cut along the lines of the latest Paris fashion plates. ‘Simon, love, I hope you realize only you could have got me out of my bed at such an ungodly hour. Don’t you know actresses are supposed to spend the morning lolling in their boudoirs?’ She brushed aside the half-curtain of costumes hung from the ceiling and advanced into the room. ‘Actually, I was supposed to go down to Roehampton and see the children, and they’re going to be thoroughly cross with me, but I shall simply have to—’ She stopped short, taking in the assembled company. Her exquisitely groomed brows rose in inquiry.

‘Cecily Summers,’ Simon said. ‘Who has an uncanny knack for bringing a playwright’s words to life with a depth he never knew was there. Cecy, we need your help.’

Mrs. Summers looked from Charles and Mélanie, whom she knew, to the unknown Manon, who had huddled back against the wall, arms folded defensively across her chest. The actress’s mobile face altered subtly, from woman of the world to supportive friend. She dropped down in the nearest chair. ‘Tell me.’

Mélanie had met Cecily Summers a handful of times in the months she’d been in Britain. She knew Mrs. Summers had a quick wit and a kind heart, but she hadn’t realized how generous or compassionate Cecily Summers was or what nerves of steel she possessed. She listened to Simon’s and Charles’s account of Manon’s plight without a brink and jumped to Simon’s suggested solution before he proposed it himself.

Manon balked. Mélanie gripped her hands and fixed her with a firm, frank stare. ‘You can’t go back to Paris. Not yet. Even if we could find a way to get you there, it’s one of the first places they’d look for you. You won’t be safe with us. We promised Francisco we’d look after you. Please let us do this for you. For him.’

She expected more argument, but at the appeal to Francisco’s memory, Manon went still. She flicked an appraising glance at Mrs. Summers, looked back at Mélanie, and gave a cautious nod.

Half an hour later, Manon, dressed in a brunette wig and a suit of boy’s clothes normally worn by Chérubin in The Marriage of Figaro, left the theater in Cecily Summers’s carriage, accompanied by Simon and Mrs. Summers. They were bound for Mrs. Summers’s villa in Rochampton until such time as the threat had been dealt with. Mrs. Summers’s husband and children were in residence at the villa, and Mrs. Summers would join them there when the theater had closed for the summer. Mr. Summers, a former rifleman, should be able to cope with any unexpected incidents.

When Simon and the two women had left the theater, David stared at the dressing room door with the expression Mélanie had seen on Charles’s face when she went into danger without him.

‘The best thing we can do for them is stay here out of sight for half an hour,’ Charles said. ‘No one should know we’re at the theater, but if we show our faces there’s always the chance someone will make the connection.’

David grimaced and nodded. Then he spun round to face Charles. ‘This settles it. I’m going to my father with what we know. Honoria may be in danger.’

‘David, listen—’

‘No, you listen.’ David strode across the room, kicking over a basket of fans and sending a gold brocade robe and a red velvet gown fluttering on the clothesline. ‘This is my cousin we’re talking about. I care about what happens to her, even if you—’

He broke off, his face suffused with horror at his own words.

Charles looked back at him, white-faced but steady-eyed. ‘Believe it or not, I’m not entirely lacking in concern for Honoria’s happiness myself.’

Mélanie sat stock-still watching her husband and his best friend engaged in a silent duel she could only begin to guess at. Echoes of whatever had happened on that long-ago visit to Lisbon reverberated between them, quickening the air and chilling Mélanie’s soul.

David swallowed. ‘I’m sorry. But—’

‘Damn it, David, if you go to your father, what then? One man’s dead and someone shot at Mélanie and me last night and made a very creditable effort to kill Manon just now. If you go to your father with our suspicions—and he doesn’t laugh in your face or commit you to Bedlam—he’ll storm about and tell half the Cabinet. Our unseen enemies will know what we know and we’ll lose what little leverage we have, along with any chance to investigate quietly. Not to mention that it will be twice as hard to protect Manon.’

‘Then what do you suggest we do?’ David demanded.

‘It’s entirely possible the ‘Honoria’ Francisco referred to has nothing to do with Honoria Talbot. Still—’ Charles drew a breath. ‘Did Honoria ever say anything that could connect to any of this? Anything to indicate she might know about danger, that she was afraid of anything—’

‘We may be cousins, but we’re hardly confidants.’ David drew a breath. ‘You always knew her better than I did.’

‘Once, perhaps. I haven’t seen her for a long time.’ Charles ran his fingers down a silver tissue cloak that hung from the clothesline.

‘She’s never been one to reveal a great deal of herself,’ David said. ‘I own I was shocked when—’

He bit back the words. The subject he and Charles had not discussed since the Glenister House ball hung between them like gunsmoke. For a moment Mélanie was afraid that if she drew a breath the pressure in the air would hurt her lungs. She was afraid that if she looked into Charles’s eyes, what she saw there would cut even deeper.

‘She didn’t say anything to you about why she’s marrying my father?’ The question seemed to burst from Charles’s lips in spite of himself.

‘Only that it’s what she wants. You know Honoria when she makes her mind up.’

‘Yes.’ Charles glanced away. ‘I can’t imagine your father was overjoyed at the match. In fact, I’m surprised he agreed to it.’

David shot a glance at him. ‘He didn’t at first. According to my sister, Mr. Fraser called on Father, and Father lost his temper and ordered him from the house. Then Father stormed over to Glenister House and reminded Glenister that Honoria has two guardians and he wasn’t about to agree to the match, whatever Glenister said.’

‘What changed his mind?’ Charles asked.

‘Honoria. She said she was of age and if Father wouldn’t give his consent she’d marry Mr. Fraser anyway. He could withhold her dowry, but given your father’s fortune that was hardly much of a threat. By the time I was sent for, Father had calmed down a bit, but he kept asking Honoria if she wanted more time to consider. She laughed and said she was three-and-twenty and it was high time she got off the shelf.’

‘Old wishes die hard.’

David raised his brows.

‘David, I’m not blind. Your parents have always wanted you to marry Honoria.’

David took a turn about the small room. He always moved as though holding himself slightly in check, as though he carried the weight of the earldom he would one day inherit. ‘Honoria never showed the remotest interest in me as anything but a cousin. They couldn’t have had any serious hopes that we’d make a match of it.’

Because they’d expected her to marry Charles. Mélanie stared at a splotch of dried Wood on the braided cuff of her gown.

‘Whatever her reasons for marrying your father, it’s difficult to see what it could have to do with the Elsinore League,’ David continued. ‘In fact it’s impossible to see what Honoria could have to do with intrigue in postwar Paris. Except—’

He looked at Charles. Charles looked back at him. ‘Honoria’s father,’ Charles said.

‘Yes. There is that.’

Charles turned to Mélanie. ‘Honoria’s father, Cyril Talbot, had Bonapartist sympathies. Of the romanticized, undergraduate sort. He liked to make shocking pronouncements round the dinner table or in the coffee room at Brooks’s.’ . ‘It drove his father and his brother—the current Lord Glenister—and my father mad,’ David said.

‘Which I suspect is the chief reason he did it.’ Charles stared at a jeweled mask on the wall. ‘But I suppose it’s possible that the same motivation led him to get entangled with a Bonapartist organization. The secret society bit would appeal to a young man thirsting for adventure. But even if he had been linked to the Elsinore League, why would his former associates be afraid for Honoria so many years after his death?’

‘He died when Miss Talbot was quite small, didn’t he?’ Mélanie said. ‘What happened?’

‘He had an accident with a gun during a shooting party. A shooting party my father was hosting at Dunmykel. Honoria was three.’

Mélanie drew in and released her breath. ‘You’re sure it was an accident?’

‘No one’s ever suggested otherwise.’

‘Good God,’ David said. ‘You’re not suggesting Cyril Talbot was murdered?’

‘I’m only asking questions in an attempt to arrive at some sort of answer. Whatever the circumstances of Lord Cyril’s death, if—and it’s still a big if—he was involved with the Elsinore League, perhaps some of his comrades promised to protect his daughter.’

‘While someone else is threatening her?’ David said.

‘The papers we decoded last night imply that someone was threatening to reveal the past. Perhaps part of the threat was for Miss Talbot to learn the truth about her father.’ Mélanie kept her voice even. She knew full well how great a threat the revelation of the truth could be.

‘And you think there’s some unknown Bonapartist who feels so great a debt of friendship to Cyril that his primary concern is Cyril’s daughter all these years later?’ David asked.

‘One can accumulate a lot of debts in the course of a friendship,’ Charles said.

David returned his gaze for a long moment. ‘Point taken.’

‘It’s still just supposition,’ Charles said. ‘But at least it’s one theory that links the pieces together.’ He pulled his watch from his pocket. ‘It should be safe for us to leave the theater now.’

Mélanie waited until they were in a hackney bound for South Audley Street before she voiced the concern she hadn’t wanted to mention in front of David. ‘You didn’t tell me David and Miss Talbot visited you in Lisbon.’

‘Didn’t I?’ Charles was looking out the cracked glass of the window. ‘There was no reason for it to come up, I suppose.’

Most people would have been deceived into thinking his tone was perfectly normal. Most people didn’t know him like she did. ‘I thought you hadn’t seen her since she was a child.’

‘Does it make a difference?’

‘There’s quite a difference between fourteen and seventeen.’ The difference between a girl and a woman.

‘David’s father was sent to meet with Wellington and the ambassador. Honoria and David and Val came with him. They weren’t in Lisbon long. I didn’t see a great deal of them.’

‘Charles, I’m stumbling in the dark if you won’t tell me everything you know about Miss Talbot.’

Charles swung his head round. His gaze met hers, black and impenetrable. ‘I don’t know anything about Honoria Talbot that could connect to any of this. Trust me.’

‘It’s not a question of trust, Charles. I think you’re being blinded by—’

He continued to stare at her, an aristocrat who wouldn’t dream of being so ill bred as to suggest a commoner has been overly familiar.

‘Your feelings,’ she said.

He gave a brief laugh. ‘A novel argument, considering a lot of people think I don’t have them.’

‘Don’t talk rubbish, Charles.’

He turned his gaze away. ‘I know her, Mel. You don’t.’ He didn’t sound angry. It would have been better if he had.

‘You knew her once, Charles. You don’t necessarily know her anymore. Unless you know her better than you’ve admitted.’

‘I know her enough to know that whatever game she’s involved in, she’s a pawn.’

‘Damn it, Charles.’ She caught his hand and gripped it. ‘We don’t even know what the bloody hell the game is that’s being played.’

He looked down at their hands. He didn’t attempt to extricate himself from her grip, but nor did he return the pressure of her touch. ‘You’re not sounding much like yourself either, Mel. You’re not usually so quick to rush to judgment.’

Mélanie bit her lip and released his hand. ‘I’m not making a judgment, Charles. I don’t know enough to do so. I’m trying to make sure we have all the facts at our disposal.’

‘And I’m telling you that we do.’

She stared down at the hackney seat. Their hands were now inches apart on the water-stained leather. Only the night before last his fingers had moved over her flesh and she had licked the sweat from his skin and wrapped herself round him and taken him into her body. For a moment, when he shuddered in her arms, his self-control shattered like crystal, she had been able to delude herself that he was hers.

But that was folly, of course. People didn’t belong to other people. If one was lucky, one could touch a proffered fraction of another’s soul, like fingers twining together across an expanse of cool sheet in the dark. But these days, no matter how tightly she gripped her husband, she seemed to touch less and less of him.

They pulled up in South Audley Street and climbed the steps without speaking. Difficult to believe they had left the house a scant twelve hours ago. Colin would be upset that they had missed breakfast in the nursery, and Jessica would have had to make do with one of her silver feeding bottles.

The pull of her bloodstained gown across her chest reminded Mélanie that she was still a nursing mother. If she’d known they’d be out all night, she’d have used her breast exhauster before she left the house.

They’d faced danger before. They’d always been able to protect the children. Surely they still could.

‘You have a visitor,’ Michael said when he opened the door. ‘A Mr. Barrington. He insisted on waiting. I’ve shown him into the sitting room.’

She and Charles looked at each other, the constraint between them forgotten. The name was unfamiliar and that, coupled with the events of the past thirty-six hours, was enough to set them both on edge.

Charles opened the sitting room door and cast a glance inside before stepping aside to allow her to precede him. A man stood by the windows. A slight, sandy-haired man of middle years, dressed in tan breeches and a dun-colored coat. Mélanie, used to choosing clothes for their effect, decided that he had dressed with the intention of creating as little notice as possible.

His gaze flickered over them, reminding her of the blood and coffee spatters on her gown, the smears of dirt and green vegetable stains on Charles’s coat, the scrapes and stubble on his face.

‘Mrs. Fraser.’ He gave her the briefest of nods, then turned to Charles. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met, Fraser. I was at Oxford before you, and then I spent some years posted in Brazil. Like you, I’ve only recently returned to Britain.’ He fixed Charles with a cool, level gaze. ‘The Foreign Secretary sent me. He wants to see you immediately.’