Secrets of a Lady (aka Daughter of the Game)

The lad Charles had employed to watch Trevennen’s rooms reported that no one had approached Trevennen since Mélanie was attacked. Charles pressed some coins into the boy’s hand and asked him to take a message to their coachman. Randall was to remain by the Marshalsea for another quarter-hour and then return to Berkeley Square.

Mélanie could feel Charles’s appraising gaze on her as they made their way along the rain-splashed maze of cobblestone alleys. Finally, as they neared the prison gates, she answered his unvoiced concerns. “Darling, don’t even think about not taking steps to throw off pursuit. I won’t collapse on you, I promise. Thank goodness you had the sense to beg an umbrella along with the brandy and bandages.”

Charles cast a brief glance at the sky, which if anything had grown even darker. Then he nodded and tilted the umbrella farther over her head.

They encountered a large family party by the gates. A stoop-shouldered man who kept checking his watch as though he was late for an appointment; a lady in a well-worn pelisse with the cuffs turned; a teenage girl whose legs were several inches too long for her bombazine skirt; and two boys who kept asking their parents why Grandpapa couldn’t come home with them.

She and Charles slipped out of the prison in the family’s wake. Outside they rounded two street corners, flagged down a hackney, then at the last minute waved it on, rounded another corner and did the same, then finally hailed a third hackney (no easy task in the rain), climbed in, and directed the driver to Bow Street.

Mélanie fell back against the squabs. The umbrella had not kept out all the rain and she was more chilled than she cared to admit to her husband.

Charles looked at her for a moment, but he merely said, “There’s no reason to hold anything back from Roth. Except the fact that you and O’Roarke were French agents. Not to mention lovers.”

“Good God, no. Being arrested would be nearly as debilitating as being killed.” For a moment, the future crowded in on her, a myriad of unpleasant possibilities that drove the air from her lungs. Charles could turn her in to Bow Street as a French spy. One part of her mind said that he never would, but another shouted back, How can you be sure? How could she really know how far hurt and anger and an outraged sense of honor might drive him? He might not know himself.

Even if he didn’t expose her as a spy, he had every right to want his freedom. She owed him that at the very least.

Her breath stuck in her throat, as she forced herself to confront what lay before her. Separation. Annulment. Divorce. A friend of theirs who had been sued for criminal conversation by her husband had lost all access to her children. The woman’s drawn face flickered before Mélanie’s gaze, a ghost of what was to come.

She should be prepared for this. The threat of exposure had always been there, a constant tension beneath the polished surface of her life. Sometimes she had been able to bury the fear so deeply she was scarcely aware of it herself. But a trick of memory, a turn of phrase, a look into Charles’s trusting eyes would bring it welling to the surface. Shame and guilt and sheer, bloody terror would wash over her in a cold sweat. And then she would force them all back to a place deep inside, because that was the only way she could continue with her life.

Now there could be no hiding from Charles or from herself. She had lived on borrowed time for seven years, and she would have to take the consequences.

They had crossed back over the bridge, but traffic had slowed to a maddening crawl. She rubbed at the condensation on the glass and peered out the window. A curricle had locked wheels with a brewer’s dray on the rain-soaked cobblestones. The patter of rain and the curses of other drivers echoed through the windows.

“Do you have a sister?” Charles said.

The question was as unexpected as a knife cut. She turned her head to look at him. “I had a sister. A younger sister.”

“She died.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.” It would have been better if she could have kept looking at him as she spoke, but instead she stared down at her hands. The remembered stench of blood invaded the moldering air of the hackney. “Eleven years ago.”

“When your father died.” The angry edge that had been in his voice when he asked his first questions about her life was gone. Something in his quiet tone was close to Charles her husband and she shied away from it. There were some things she hadn’t spoken about to anyone, not even Raoul.

“Yes,” she said again. Her hands curled into knots.

Their hackney lurched forward, veering round the accident. Charles looked at her for a moment across the width of the carriage. “It can’t be easy to lose a sibling,” he said. “I find it painful enough that Edgar and I aren’t the friends we once were. Gisèle’s so much younger that we were never companions in the same way, but I always felt it was my job to protect her. If anything had happened to her, I think I’d have felt responsible, no matter where the blame lay.”

How, when every feeling he had ever had for her must have turned to hate, could he still read her with such devastating accuracy? Her own sister’s face swam before Mélanie’s eyes. Promises made, promises broken. Surely that had not been her first betrayal, but it was the first she remembered. “One can’t dwell on one’s failures,” she said. “Or we’d all go mad.”

“Did O’Roarke tell you that?” His voice turned harsh.

“No, you did. After those documents got lost that you were supposed to collect from Count Nesselrode.”

She watched understanding dawn in his eyes. She wasn’t sure why she had said it, save that his anger was easier to bear than the excruciating hint of softness that had crept into his expression.

“Of course,” he said. “There seems to be no end to my idiocy. To think it never occurred to me that those papers disappeared because my wife had taken them.”

“It was damnably difficult.” She made her voice brittle, slashing at him, slashing at herself, reminding them both of everything that had been destroyed between them. It was a form of self-mutilation. Better to sink into the gutter of hatred than to delude herself into thinking anything was left of what he’d once felt for her. “You never were an easy man to deceive, Charles. Raoul warned me you were dangerous when he sent me after the ring. He said you notice details most people would ignore.”

“Probably because I overlooked the most important detail of all where you were concerned. Oh, Christ.” His hands clenched. He stared at her with eyes that were dark and hate-filled. “Do you have any idea how many people went to their deaths because of your duplicity and my criminal stupidity?”

“It was war, Charles.” She kept her gaze steady, because this was a demon she was used to battling. “People die. Good people, innocent people. Different people may have died because of things you told me, but people would have died anyway.”

He was silent for a moment. When he spoke his voice was low and raw. “But they wouldn’t have been on my conscience.”

She shook her head. “I know you think the world is your responsibility, Charles. But you of all people should know that if they’re on anyone’s conscience, they’re on mine.”

“But you could have done nothing without my complicity. It seems we continue to be partners. You betrayed me, but in trusting you I betrayed my friends, my country, and any shred of honor I possessed.”

“Oh, Charles.” Tenderness for him welled up in her chest. “Underneath the radical reformer, you’re still a British gentleman to the core.”

“It isn’t only gentlemen who take their word of honor seriously.”

“No, but you’ve been bred from the cradle to place it above all else.”

He turned his gaze to the hackney window. “Perhaps I’m being a bloody, idealistic fool. But in this shifting sands of a world we live in, I’d like to believe my word at least counts for something. Otherwise I don’t see that I have much integrity left.”

She studied the bleak outline of his profile. “Yes, but your word to whom, darling? The line between honor and dishonor is often a matter of definition. After all—” She bit back the words.

He swung his gaze toward her. “What?”

She hesitated a moment. “You were a spy, Charles.”

He gave a rough, incredulous laugh. “Oh, for God’s sake, Mel. Don’t compare us. I’m far out of your league.”

“I know you don’t like to use the word. Partly out of modesty; partly, I think, because you don’t like the associations of what it means to be a spy. But you can’t deny that your errands for the ambassador were a lot more than fetching and carrying.”

“Fetching and carrying can be damnably difficult. But all I did was—”

“Steal documents. Slip behind enemy lines. Pose as a French soldier or a Portuguese conde or a Spanish priest or anything else that would help in gaining information. What the devil do you think a spy does?”

“You know the answer to that better than I do.”

“Call it what you will, Charles, you couldn’t do the things you did in the war without being an expert at—”

“Lying?”

“I was going to say deception. But what is deception but a form of lying?”

“You give me too much credit, madam.” Charles’s voice cut so sharply she could feel it scrape against her skin. “Whatever my minor accomplishments, I can’t even begin to understand the lies you’ve told.”

She looked into his eyes, as cold now as January ice. With the sharp finality of a tolling bell, she realized how truly wide the chasm was between them. She would have said she’d known there was no hope for them from the moment she told him the truth. Yet in some small, unacknowledged corner of her mind, she had thought that if Charles could see past his anger, maybe, just maybe they somehow could find a way to go on together.

She had reckoned without the inbred training of a lifetime. However much Charles might reject the values of his world, his gentleman’s code of honor would make it impossible for him ever to forgive her for forcing him to break his word and betray his comrades. He was a remarkable man in many ways, but she doubted he’d ever be able to see beyond the limits of the code he’d been raised on.

She said nothing for the rest of the drive to Bow Street and neither did Charles. “Stay in the carriage,” he told her in an impersonal voice when the hackney pulled up in front of the Public Office. “I’ll see if Roth’s here.”

A few moments later he returned to report that Roth was next door in the Brown Bear Tavern. He took her left arm in a grip that was a little firmer than necessary and guided her into the narrow brick building. Despite the rainy gloom outside, the smoky light in the low-ceilinged room took a moment to get used to. The smell of gin and tobacco made her head spin.

The low murmur of conversation stopped at their entrance. Ladies in fashionable bonnets and pelisses—even if those garments were decidedly the worse for wear—would be a rare sight at the Brown Bear.

The sound of a chair being scraped back came from the far corner of the room. Roth had been sitting at a table with a young man in the red and blue of the Bow Street Patrol and an older man with a raffish spotted handkerchief round his throat and a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. Roth got to his feet, said something to his companions, and came toward Charles and Mélanie. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder.”

Without further speech, he led them upstairs to a small room furnished with a round table, two chairs with peeling varnish, and a thin cot covered with a blue blanket. “Not very commodious, but at least it’s private. The Brown Bear’s popular with thieves, but it’s also very friendly to thief-takers. We use this room to interview suspects and occasionally to keep them overnight. Can I get you anything? Tea? Something stronger?”

They shook their heads. Roth waved them to the chairs and perched on the edge of the cot. “You learned something from Carevalo? I thought—Are you all right, Mrs. Fraser?”

“Yes.” Mélanie folded her hands in her lap, careful not to jar her side. “Or rather, no, but that’s part of the story.”

“We were right about Carevalo,” Charles said. He recounted the day’s events thus far, neatly excising all mention of her revelations and their second encounter with Raoul.

Roth’s eyes widened slightly, but he refrained from questions or even exclamations of surprise. He scribbled in his notebook as Charles talked, chewed on his pencil, scowled. When it came to the attack at the Marshalsea, his head jerked up and he stared at Mélanie. “Good God.”

“It’s not as bad as my husband makes it sound, Mr. Roth,” Mélanie said, though in truth Charles had taken care not to sensationalize the incident. “But it does indicate someone is trying to stop us from finding the ring or Helen Trevennen.”

Roth leaned forward and tapped his pencil against his notebook. “This Iago Lorano—you have no idea who he is?”

“I’m quite sure Lorano isn’t his real name,” Charles said. “It seems likeliest he works for a royalist faction who also want the ring. He could even be in the employ of the Spanish embassy.”

“You’ve thought about talking to the embassy? You must have friends there.”

“Acquaintances. I’ve made too many speeches in support of the liberals in Spain to make me popular with the royalists. Talking to the embassy would be a waste of time we don’t have. Assuming I could make them believe the story, I’m not sure they’d think my son’s safety was worth the sacrifice of giving the ring to Carevalo. And if they aren’t already on the trail of the ring, I don’t want to rouse their interest in it.”

“Fair enough.” Roth flipped to another page of his notebook. “We’ve circulated a description of the man Polly saw. We have four leads that sound likely. Harry Rogers, a cutpurse who works round the docks; Jack Evans, a former prizefighter turned thief; Bill Trelawny, a highwayman last heard of working with a gang on Hounslow Heath; and Stephen Watkins, a cardsharp who claims he’ll take on any job if the money is right. I have patrols questioning their associates.”

Mélanie’s fingers clenched. “Carevalo may have ordered them to kill Colin if they think they’ll be taken.”

“We won’t stage a foolhardy rescue attempt. Though if they’re half as good as they seem to be they’ll have gone to earth where not even their friends can find them. Men can disappear for years in the rookeries of Seven Dials and St. Giles.” He leaned back, resting his hands on the cot. “Can you find the ring?”

“We don’t have any choice,” Charles said.

Roth nodded. “I’ll make inquiries about Iago Lorano, see if we can at least find out who he is. I’ll have a man circulate questions among fences we know to see if we can find news of the ring. You might have Mr. Addison and Miss Mendoza report to me when they finish their inquiries among the jewelers.”

“I’ve already instructed them to do so,” Charles said. “Between them, Addison and Blanca can cover a lot of territory in short order.”

“What about Carevalo? Any idea where he might be hiding?”

“None, but O’Roarke is making inquiries. He’s the likeliest to know Carevalo’s associates.”

“I’ll have one of the patrols make inquiries among the Spanish expatriates as well.” Roth scribbled on a page from his notebook and tore it out. “My direction. Don’t hesitate to send word to me, at any time of the day or night. If not here, at my house, number Forty-two, Wardour Street. My sister lives with me. She’ll know where to find me if the people here don’t.”

Charles tucked the paper inside his coat. “Thank you.”

Roth chewed on the tip of his pencil. “Thus far the chief magistrate knows only the sketchiest details of this case. Should you wish it, of course, you could have the Home Secretary himself take an interest in the matter. I take it you don’t wish it?”

“No. We want our son back. The last thing we want is people questioning the political and diplomatic implications of putting the ring in Carevalo’s hands.”

“So I thought. The chief magistrate is a busy man. There’s no need for me to burden him with the details of Carevalo’s involvement.”

Mélanie forced her fingers to unclench. “Thank you.”

“It’s the least I can do, Mrs. Fraser. I wish there was more.” He started to get up from the cot, then sat back down. “One more thing.” He flipped through his notebook again and studied what he’d written. It seemed to Mélanie that he was making rather too much of a show of it. “This morning you were convinced the French had ended up with the ring seven years ago, despite Carevalo’s accusations. What changed your mind?”

Charles leaned back in his chair, his pose deliberately casual. “With Carevalo insisting, we had to consider other possibilities. We didn’t know for a certainty until Violet Goddard told us she’d seen the ring.”

Roth leaned forward, elbows on his knees, notebook dangling from his fingers. “So when you first read Carevalo’s demand, you still thought there was a good chance the French had the ring. But instead of pursuing that scenario, you went to see Sergeant Baxter and then to the Drury Lane. You made a lucky choice. In your place, I’d probably have wasted hours at the French embassy, trying to get word of the soldiers who escaped the ambush seven years ago.”

“We knew it would take time to get any information at the embassy,” Charles said. “We hoped we could get answers from Baxter and the Drury Lane company more quickly.”

“Yes. Of course, if the French had been involved, it would have been important to start the inquiries at the embassy as soon as possible. But fortunately that wasn’t the case.”

“No,” Charles said.

Roth closed his notebook. Mélanie could see him toting up the incongruous details—the inconsistencies in their actions, the time gaps in Charles’s story, the changes in their body language since he’d seen them this morning. His mind was working very much as her own would in a similar situation. Jeremy Roth could prove to be a more powerful ally than she had realized.

And a very dangerous opponent.

Charles glanced up and down Bow Street as they emerged from the Brown Bear. It was not yet three o’clock, but with the soot-stained buildings leaning over the street, the rain clouds massed overhead, and the steady downpour obscuring vision, it felt like twilight. A crossing sweeper was clearing away the mud and horse manure at the intersection with Russell Street, shoulders hunched against the rain. Great-coated men with umbrellas hurried toward the shelter of taverns or coffeehouses. Charles hadn’t asked the hackney to wait for them, on the chance that they were being followed. No new hackney was immediately within view. He looked at Mélanie. “We’d better walk toward Covent Garden. How’s the wound?”

“I’m fine.”

He studied her face beneath the brim of her bonnet as they walked along the muddy pavement. She was paler than usual and the tension in the set of her mouth betrayed just how hard she was working to control the pain of the wound. But that she could control it, he had no doubt. He shook his head at his own certainty. The very fabric of her life was alien to him, yet he could still read the clues in her face as though it were his own.

In the space of a few hours, he had learned that everything about their marriage was a lie. And then an unknown assailant had stuck a knife in her ribs. If the blade had struck a few inches higher, he might well be a widower.

The possibility, not quite articulated before, slammed home in his mind. To all intents and purposes he had lost her when she told him the truth of what she had been and done and why she had married him. Yet the prospect of losing her to death brought a prickle of sweat to his skin and stripped his throat raw. He recalled the words a friend of his, a French journalist, had used in describing the Reign of Terror. We’d nourished ourselves on the dream for so long, you see, that we couldn’t let go of it. Even when it had turned into a nightmare.

The rain had whipped up, a deluge that fell in sheets off the umbrella and blew icy drafts in their faces. Charles caught sight of a hackney up ahead and waved, but the driver took off without seeing him.

“Charles.” Mélanie’s fingers tightened on his arm. “We’re being followed. No, don’t look round. It’s better he doesn’t know we’ve spotted him.”

“Are you sure?”

“I caught his reflection in the window glass a moment ago. A man in a dark greatcoat with a hat pulled low over his face.”

He took a few steps in silence, weighing possibilities. “Are you up to a diversion?”

“Dearest, I’m up to whatever needs doing.”

“Stay in this shop”—he steered her into the nearest doorway, a tobacconist’s—“as though you’re waiting while I find a hackney. If he takes the bait and walks past, you can follow him. I’ll round the corner and see if I can lead him into a court or alley.”

“Don’t take unnecessary chances. We don’t know if he can tell us anything.”

He turned up the collar of his greatcoat. “I’m not a complete fool.”

“You keep the umbrella.”

“Mel—”

“Don’t be pigheaded, Charles. It will look odd otherwise. You’d keep the umbrella if I was waiting inside.”

He nodded, then hesitated a moment. “If it turns nasty, stay out of the fray. We can’t afford to have you bleeding all over the street.”

She put the umbrella into his hand. “I’m the last person in the world you ought to be worrying about just now, darling.”

He stepped out of the doorway, stopped as though scanning the street for a hackney, and walked on. The only other pedestrians visible were a cherry-seller pushing his barrow toward the shelter of an overhang and a rain-soaked errand boy laden down with parcels. Charles kept one eye on the window glass. He caught a flash of movement, but he could not make out anything more clearly.

He rounded the corner into Russell Street. Rainwater sluiced off the umbrella. Shop signs flapped overhead—the golden balls of a pawnshop, the striped pole of a barber, the gilded key of a locksmith. He quickened his pace and ducked beneath a low stone archway into a narrow court. Once there, he snapped the umbrella shut and flattened himself against the rotting wood of the nearest doorway.

Thirty seconds later a man in a dark greatcoat and a low-crowned hat appeared in the mouth of the court. The faint light from the street behind him outlined his form but left his face in shadow. He paused and scanned the court. Come on, you bastard, Charles thought.

Seconds ticked by. The man walked forward.

Charles lunged out of his hiding place and hurled himself on the shadowy figure. The force of the assault knocked them both to the slimy cobblestones. They landed in a tangle of damp wool and flailing boots. Charles sat up, gripping the man’s throat with both hands, and found himself staring into the blue eyes of his brother.