Secrets of a Lady (aka Daughter of the Game)

Mélanie slackened her grip on Charles’s shoulders and drew back.

Edgar stared down at his brother. “Charles, for God’s sake, what are you talking about?”

“She has a point, Edgar.” Charles kept his gaze on Mélanie. “Husbands and wives shouldn’t have secrets from each other.”

That last was a challenge. Mélanie took him up on it. “No, they shouldn’t.” She dropped back into her chair. “At least once the truth is out, it can be faced.”

“An interesting way of putting it.” They regarded each other for a moment. The day’s revelations thrummed in the air between them, like pistol shots echoing across the green after a duel.

Edgar sat down on a cushioned bench between them. “Charles, I may not know your secrets as I did when we were boys, but I’d stake my life on it that you didn’t murder anyone.”

“There we’re in agreement,” Mélanie said. She leaned back against the carved mahogany slats of the chair. “Charles? Without the melodrama?”

“She’s dead,” Charles said. “If it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t be. You could call that murder.”

Quiet settled over the library, an uneasy quiet that precedes a storm. The tension of words as yet unvoiced pressed against the oak wainscot. “Who?” Mélanie asked.

“Kitty—Katelina Ashford.”

Edgar sucked in his breath. “Charles—” He looked at his brother, as though Charles was a man pushing himself beyond the limits of his endurance. “Are you sure you want to tell us this?”

“Not in the least, but I don’t see an alternative.”

“Kitty Ashford?” Mélanie sifted through her memories, trying to find an image to go with the half-remembered name. Her first days in Lisbon. A party at the embassy. Two officers’ wives whispering behind the ivory sticks of their fans. “She was a Spanish noblewoman married to an English officer. She died. Not long before I came to Lisbon. Some sort of accident. I forgot she was Velasquez’s cousin. So that means she was connected to Carevalo, too?”

“Aristocratic families are as intermarried in Spain as they are here. Kitty and Victor’s grandmother was a Carevalo daughter who married a Velasquez. Their daughter was Kitty’s mother and their son was Victor’s father.” Charles’s voice sounded distanced, as though he was speaking about events that had little meaning for him. Charles only spoke like that when his feelings were very near to the surface indeed. “Kitty and Velasquez were close as children. I think he was half in love with her. It’s not surprising. She was quite lovely.”

His voice had an odd quality to it as he said this last. For a moment his gaze was somewhere beyond the confines of the library. It occurred to Mélanie that she had never, in the seven years she had known him, heard him describe another woman as lovely. The word lingered in the air, with echoes that went beyond mere physical beauty. Her fingers closed on the gros de Naples folds of her gown. “She met her husband during the war?”

Charles’s gaze moved over the mantel as though he could not bear to keep still—the invitations she’d stuck into the gilt frame of the chimney glass, the wax tapers burning in the silver candlesticks, the Meissen tinderbox they’d brought back from Vienna. “Edward Ashford went to Spain with Sir John Moore in ’08. He and Kitty were betrothed before Corunna and married a few months later. Kitty stayed in Lisbon. I think she would have been happier following the drum, but Ashford was the sort who believed women—wives, at least—are meant to be sheltered. And I think he liked being free to pursue Spanish girls on the campaign.”

Mélanie folded her hands. She could see where the story was going. Or where with most men one would think it was going. It did not fit what she knew of her husband. What she thought she knew. “Go on.”

“We met at a party at the embassy in Christmas of ’09. I’d taken refuge in the library.”

“What a surprise,” Mélanie murmured.

He smiled, a faint lift of his mouth that didn’t reach his eyes. “Not really. The surprise was that Kitty slipped into the room, claimed she was bored to tears, and asked if I minded if she joined me.”

“And?”

“We played chess. She won.”

No wonder she had caught Charles’s interest. Mélanie’s gaze flickered toward the table that held the chess game she and Charles had begun—was it only yesterday? Charles had had her in check when they left off, though she’d seen a way out of it. She could imagine the scene at that Christmas party in 1809. She knew the library in the British embassy well—she’d gone into the room often enough in search of her errant husband at some embassy function. She could imagine Charles—a younger Charles, he would have been only twenty-two—shoulders sunk into one of the burgundy leather chairs, head bent over Adam Smith or John Donne or the latest London papers. She could imagine Kitty Ashford slipping into the room.

Unusual coloring for a Spaniard. The words of the officers’ wives came back to her with sudden clarity. Hair like honey and the prettiest green eyes. Charles would have been startled at the interruption, embarrassed perhaps, and then—

“You were so delighted to find someone who could give you a good game that you began to play chess a great deal?” Mélanie said. The words came out sounding more arch than she intended.

Charles looked into the fire, as though scenes from the past flickered between the griffons’ heads on the andirons. “We played chess. She borrowed books from me. She convinced me to take her riding outside the city, places an officer’s wife wouldn’t normally go. Kit had a restless intellect and a rebellious streak. I think that was what had drawn her to Ashford in the first place. An English soldier was the most daring and adventurous husband she could choose. Or so it seemed. She couldn’t have picked anyone more rigidly conventional than Ashford.”

Mélanie willed her shoulders to relax. Don’t let yourself get locked into a pattern. Raoul’s cool, steady voice echoed unexpectedly in her head. It can be fatal. Always be ready to shift the facts, to look at them in a new way. She studied her husband, the tension about his mouth, the shadows round his eyes and in their depths. She forced herself to let her image of the man he had been when they met break apart in her mind. “The Ashfords’ marriage was a disaster,” she said. “To all intents and purposes it was over before you met Kitty. You wouldn’t have let what seems to have happened between you happen if it had been otherwise.”

His mouth twisted. “Two steps ahead of me as usual, Mel. You’re right on both counts. Though it didn’t…happen for some time. Oh, I’ll admit that from the first I—”

“Wanted her,” Mélanie said.

He looked into her eyes. “Crude but true.”

“Dear God.” Edgar pushed himself to his feet. “Mélanie, you shouldn’t have to listen—”

“It’s all right, Edgar. I know Charles wasn’t a virgin when he married me.”

Edgar regarded her with that puzzled expression he always wore when she said something particularly blunt.

Charles looked at his brother. “Did you know? About Kitty and me? I always wondered.”

“Not then.” Edgar ran his hand through his hair, the way Charles often did. “I wasn’t in Lisbon much in those days. Though I was at that reception the night she—the night she had her accident. Christ, it was awful. But I had no idea that she was your—A few weeks later, I heard some gossip in the officers’ mess.” He drew a breath. Beneath the embarrassment, his face ached with regret. “I wish you could have confided in me, Charles.”

“You think you could have saved me from my folly?”

“I wouldn’t presume. But after she died—you shouldn’t have had to bear your burdens alone.”

Charles’s gaze went bleak. “One could argue that that was the least I deserved.”

Edgar turned away, as though he had glimpsed something he didn’t want to face. He crossed to the table where the decanters were kept. “She’d have been a hard woman for any man to resist. She—Oh, God, Mélanie, I keep putting my foot in it.”

Mélanie smiled at him over her shoulder. “I’d already heard her described as beautiful.”

“There was a brightness about her.” Edgar rejoined them, carrying a glass and the whisky decanter. He stared down at the cut glass, shot through by the light of the fire. “A sort of reckless brilliance.”

“Yes.” Charles spoke without looking at his brother. “She met life head-on instead of shying away from it. Which was why sitting cooped up with the other officers’ wives in Lisbon was exactly the wrong place for her.”

Edgar refilled Charles’s and Mélanie’s glasses, splashed whisky into a glass for himself, and returned to the bench.

Charles took a quick swallow of whisky, tented his fingers together, and said, as if reciting a date from a history book, “By early 1812 we were lovers.”

Mélanie realized her hands were gripped tight in her lap. She knew Charles had had mistresses of course. Though he was no rake, he’d been far from inexperienced when they married. She’d never questioned him about those liaisons, but she’d always assumed he’d chosen women with whom there was no risk of emotional intimacy. He’d retreated into the safer realms of the intellect long before he reached adulthood. Detachment had been a survival mechanism, a way of coping with his father’s cutting tongue and his mother’s violent moods, and then later with his mother’s death and his own estrangement from his brother. He hadn’t let his guard down with anyone until he met Mélanie.

Or so she had always thought. So he had led her to believe. But there was no mistaking what lay beneath his bonedry, factual statement. Despite the overlay of bitterness and pain, his face held an echo of what he had felt for Kitty Ashford. An echo not of lust but of an unbearable longing.

“There was no hope for it, of course.” Charles spoke with the clinical detachment she had heard Geoffrey Blackwell use when he amputated a gangrenous limb. “I did try to convince her to run off to Italy with me, but she wouldn’t leave her husband. Kit could rebel, but she took the family honor seriously. She told me once that her debt to her family went back generations. How could a love of a few months hope to compete?” He drew a breath. The wine-colored silk of his dressing gown shimmered in the firelight. “In April I was sent to retrieve some papers from Valencia. While I was gone, Kitty realized she was pregnant.”

Edgar made a strangled sound. “Good God.”

“Quite,” Charles said.

Mélanie’s nails pressed into her palms. She began to have a sickening sense of where the story was headed. “Her husband was away as well?”

“Oh, yes. Ashford hadn’t been home in two months and wasn’t expected to return until after the campaigning season. Her options were not pleasant.”

“Charles,” Edgar said in a hoarse voice.

Charles glanced at his brother with something between defiance and apology. “It’s an ugly story, Edgar. But it’s got to be finished. I’m sorry for the associations.”

Edgar made no reply. Rain pattered against the long library windows. Mélanie felt the heat of the fire, the hardness of the chair at her back, the dull ache of her wound. “Kitty’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“No. She threw herself off a footbridge in the garden during a reception at the embassy.”

The silence was broken by the sound of crystal shattering. Edgar’s whisky glass had fallen from his fingers, hit the leg of the bench, and broken into shards on the chestnut and gold of the carpet. Without speaking, he got to his feet and strode from the room.

The pungent smell of whisky filled the air. Mélanie closed her eyes for a moment. “How do you know?”

“Velasquez. He was the only person in whom she’d confided about her predicament. When I returned to Lisbon, he came to see me, told me the truth of her death, and challenged me to a duel.”

“You fought him?” Charles was a crack shot, but he abhorred dueling as an archaic way of settling differences.

“I fought him. At the time I rather hoped he’d put a bullet through me, but he was drunk and only grazed my arm. I deloped.” He looked up at her with a gaze from which he had forced all emotion. “So you see, it wouldn’t necessarily help if Victor Velasquez knew we want the ring to get Colin back. Kitty wasn’t the only one who took the family honor seriously. I think Velasquez feels he has yet to avenge her. He might weigh Colin in the scale against the baby who died with Kitty.”

Mélanie got to her feet and walked to the fireplace without knowing what she meant to do. She stared down into the fire, the leaping flame, the wrought-metal grate, the sticks of pine with their sweet, clean smell, redolent of her first memories of Britain when she came here as Charles’s wife. With a few words, an illusion that had been at the heart of her marriage had shattered like the crystal of Edgar’s glass. “You already did that,” she said.

“Did what?”

“Weighed Colin in the scale against Kitty’s baby.” She turned, leaned against the mantel, looked at her husband, the father of her children. For a moment, she wondered if she’d ever really understood him at all. “It was only—what? seven months?—after Kitty died that you were sent after the ring. And you found me, a woman without protection, with a fatherless child on the way. I know you’re not one to believe in fate, darling, but it must have seemed the perfect opportunity to make up for failing Kitty and your own baby.”

He shook his head. “If you think that’s why I asked you to marry me, you aren’t as good a judge of character as I always thought.”

“No?” She studied the face she knew so well, the eyes that mirrored so many of her memories. His head was tilted down in that way that gave him the unexpected look of a vulnerable schoolboy. It hit her, with the force of a blow, the full horror this would have been for Charles. Charles, who planned, who foresaw consequences, who seldom—if ever—let his passions rule his head, who took his responsibilities seriously, who loved his children without condition. “It wasn’t your fault she killed herself, Charles.”

“It was my fault she was pregnant.”

“Both your faults. I assume the affair was mutual.”

“Yes. It was that.” Something shifted in his eyes. For a moment she realized he was speaking to her not as a woman who had betrayed him, not even as his wife, but as his closest friend. She hadn’t thought he would ever speak to her in that way again. He leaned forward. “But Kit had more to lose, so I was the one who should have been careful. Don’t try to tell me I’m blameless, Mel. Not you, of all people.”

“Of course you aren’t blameless, darling. No one should bring children into the world without being in a position to care for them. I know that better than anyone. I also know it’s far easier said than done. Once the mistake had been made, there were other options. She could have waited until you came back and told you about the baby.”

“And given me the chance to do what pathetically little I might to help?”

“If she knew you at all, she must have realized you wouldn’t abandon her. She could have gone to Italy with you. You could have taken her to Scotland. It wouldn’t have been easy. You’d have been ostracized by polite society—or at least she would—but none of you would have starved and she and the child would have been sure of your love. That’s more than most children have.”

“Then my failure is all the greater. Perhaps if she’d had more faith in my love she would have waited.”

“It was your baby, too. You deserved to know about it.”

He held her gaze for a moment. “Did you tell O’Roarke about Colin?”

“Yes. But I told you first. I didn’t realize I was pregnant until Blanca and I were in the mountains waiting to intercept you.” She saw his face twist at the memory. “I wasn’t trying to play on your sympathies that morning you found me being sick by the stream, darling. I swear it. I was honestly trying to decide what to do about the child I was carrying. I’d realized I wanted to keep the baby no matter what, you see. I wanted him, Charles. I didn’t do it to trap you. Acquit me of that at least. I was shocked when you asked me to marry you.”

“You hadn’t bargained on the extent of my idiocy, I suppose.”

“I didn’t know your mistress had just killed herself while pregnant with your child. If I’d known that, not to mention that you had questions about your own paternity—”

“You think that’s why I married you? To replay the farce of my own childhood?”

“No, but I think you were determined to be a better father to Colin than Kenneth Fraser was to you.”

“That goes without saying. But it wasn’t until later—after Father died—that I realized he probably wasn’t my father at all.”

“Darling, you’d wondered for years, perhaps without even admitting it to yourself.”

“Perhaps.” Charles glanced into the fire. “O’Roarke didn’t want his child?”

“Raoul lived his life as though he might be killed at any moment. He still does. He couldn’t afford to think about his own future, let alone a family.”

“And he couldn’t have married you in any case. Last I heard, he had a wife in Ireland.”

“Yes, though they haven’t lived together for years. He offered to send me to France and provide for me and the child. I couldn’t—” She grimaced, a rank taste in her mouth. “I told myself I couldn’t turn my back on my work and my comrades and my cause. But to be brutally honest, darling, I also couldn’t bear the thought of being shunted off out of the fray. If I’d truly put Colin first, I suppose I’d have taken Raoul up on his offer. And yet Colin would have been immeasurably poorer, not having you for a father.”

“But that wasn’t why you agreed to be my wife.” His fingers curled round the brocade arms of his chair. “You consulted with O’Roarke before you gave me an answer, didn’t you? That’s why it took you three days to decide.”

“I couldn’t very well have made such a decision without consulting him.”

“No. I don’t suppose you could.” Anger leapt in his eyes. “How the devil did you think it would end? You couldn’t have expected to stay married to me forever. You couldn’t have wanted to.”

She twisted her hands together, but she didn’t let herself flinch from his gaze. “I’d scarcely known you a month when we were married. I knew you were a remarkable man, but I didn’t understand in the least why you’d proposed to me. You didn’t exactly wear your heart on your sleeve, dearest. You still don’t. I thought your proposal was some sort of quixotic, chivalrous gesture. I didn’t realize—”

“That I have feelings just like a normal person?”

“I didn’t realize how deep your feelings ran. I didn’t realize how completely you gave your loyalty. I didn’t realize how much I could hurt you.” She swallowed, remembering the quiet conviction in his voice as he spoke his wedding vows. It had been like a shock of cold fire, the realization that whyever he was marrying her, this man took those vows as a solemn promise. What she hadn’t known until now was that that promise was more than half a debt he felt he owed to another woman. That the loyalty he gave to her was the loyalty that belonged to Kitty Ashford. “I’m not saying I’d have acted differently if I had known,” she said. “I can’t be sure. But when I agreed to be your wife, I hadn’t the least idea what marriage meant to you.” Or to me.

“And Colin?” Charles’s voice was harsh. “What was supposed to happen to Colin when the marriage had served its purpose?”

Her fingers locked together. “I was used to thinking of immediate objectives and not giving much thought to the future. I hadn’t yet realized one can’t do that when one has children. But to the extent I considered the future at all—I thought I could walk away from the marriage and take Colin with me. Until I saw how much you loved Colin. And how much Colin loved you.”

“And then?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“I was actually mad enough to tell Raoul that we’d made a horrible mistake and we had to tell you the truth. Raoul told me not to be a bloody idiot. He said if you knew the truth the marriage would certainly be over and I’d either have to leave and take Colin with me or give Colin up to you. Not to mention the fact that I might be arrested as a spy. He said if I really couldn’t handle it any longer, he’d send Colin and me to France. I took that as a challenge. Like you, I don’t care to admit there’s any challenge I can’t meet, dearest.”

“And O’Roarke knew that challenging you was the best way to keep you at your post.”

“Oh, yes, Raoul’s fiendishly good at getting people to do what he wants. Besides, by then it was late 1813 and Wellington had pushed his way into France. Raoul asked me if I wanted to turn my back on the cause I’d worked for so long just when things were desperate.” His voice echoed in her head, at once caustic and impassioned. She looked at Charles. “And the truth is, my darling, I didn’t want to turn my back on it.”

“So our farce of a marriage continued. A marriage born of your duplicity.”

“And your guilt.”

He started to protest. Then he looked away. When he spoke the words seemed to be dragged out of him. “Oh, Christ. Can we ever really be sure of why we do anything? I’d failed Kitty when she needed me most. If you’re asking if I thought of that when I saw you in trouble, then of course I did. If you’re asking if I thought of my own unborn child when I learned you were pregnant, then of course that’s true as well. I told you the truth when I said I’d never expected to marry. I didn’t think I’d be much of a prize as a husband, and my parents had given me a singularly low opinion of the institution. If it hadn’t been for your predicament and my guilty conscience, I might never have found the courage to offer for you. But—I didn’t need guilt or duty to make me want you for my wife or love your child.”

Her fingers ached to smooth the shadows from his eyes. She wondered if she’d had this same urge to ease hurts before she was a mother. She couldn’t remember. “I’ve tainted it for you, haven’t I?” she said. “Whatever your reasons for marrying me, you gave your love to Colin freely, without condition. Now you feel as though I manipulated you into it. If you think everything between you and me was false, what does that do to what’s between you and Colin?”

His eyes went cold. “I’d never,” he said with precision, “let what’s happened between you and me affect how I feel about Colin.”

“But Colin’s inextricably bound up in everything that’s happened between us, from that moment you found me being sick by the stream. I didn’t mean to use him to trap you, but I did drag him into the deception with me. That’s probably the most unforgivable thing I’ve ever done.”

He stared at her, his gaze steady, appraising. “If I’d known the truth,” he said, “I’d never have let myself become Colin’s father. But that doesn’t change the fact that I am his father.”

And he always would be. But what did that mean for their future life when he couldn’t bear to live with Colin’s mother?

The fire gusted behind her and let loose a puff of smoke that prickled her eyes. She unhooked the brass dustpan and broom from the stand beside the fireplace and stared down at the wreckage of the glass Edgar had dropped. “At least now that I know about Kitty, I have an idea of what went wrong between you and Edgar.”

“What?” Charles turned his head.

“Why you aren’t as close as you once were.” She dropped down on the carpet. A jolt of pain reminded her of the wound in her side. She swept the sparkling shards of crystal into the dustpan. “It can’t have been easy for him to learn you’d been the lover of the woman he loved himself.”

In seven years, she could count the times she had taken her quick-witted husband completely by surprise. This was one of them. “My brother broke his share of hearts in the Peninsula,” Charles said, “but he wasn’t in love with Kit. He scarcely knew her.”

“He may have loved her from afar, but there’s no doubt he loved her.” She stood and emptied the dustpan into the fire. The fragments of crystal sparkled diamond-bright in the flame. “Didn’t you see his face when you were talking, darling? He couldn’t even bear to hear the whole story.”

“Of course he couldn’t. A story about a woman killing herself cuts a bit too close to the bone. Not because he loved Kitty. Because her fate is rather too much like Mother’s.”

Which must have burned Charles all the more. Mélanie returned the broom and dustpan to their stand. “There is that, of course. But it was more than the painful associations that drove him from the room. You could see it in his eyes.”

Charles picked up his whisky glass and stared at it. “I’d have noticed.”

“Under normal circumstances I don’t doubt it, but you can scarcely have been yourself at the time, dearest. You never talked to him about Kitty. And Edgar was away with his regiment most of the time in those days.”

Charles tossed off the last of the whisky. “Even if it were true, whatever went wrong between Edgar and me started long before either of us met Kitty, when I was still at Oxford. When Mother died.”

“Then perhaps what happened with Kitty merely made it worse.”

He twisted his empty glass between his hands. She could see him turning the possibility over in his mind. Then he shook his head. “We’ve scarcely time to dwell on it at the moment. If this sordid story has convinced you there’s no good to be had from talking to Velasquez, it’s served its purpose. There’s no point in discussing it further.”

Mélanie hesitated, but instinct said she had pushed him as far as she could. She moved to the door. “Edgar must have forestalled Laura. I’ll see if the food’s ready.”

Charles pulled his dressing gown closed at the neck. He looked more weary than she had ever seen him. “You’re unfailingly practical.”

She gave a bleak smile. “I’m a mother.”

Colin shifted his position on the bed. His leg jerked. He sat up and disentangled the chain that ran from the metal cuff round his ankle to a similar cuff on the bedpost. It didn’t hurt, really, except when he pulled on it. But it felt very undignified.

He’d managed to sleep when they first brought him here, once his heart stopped pounding so loud he could hear it. But now he felt as though he’d been sleeping for hours and he didn’t think he could anymore, even if it was the only way to pass the time.

He hitched himself up against the thin pillow and kicked off the scratchy blanket. The air clogged his throat and tickled his nose. Maybe that was because of the dust motes dancing in the glow from the rush light beside the bed. The air had a sour smell, too, like his stuffed duck when he’d left it outside for days and it had got rained on.

He’d only been in a place like this once before, last year just before Christmas, when Mummy took him with her to give toys to children whose parents didn’t have enough money to buy them presents. Some of the places they’d gone then had been even dirtier and damper than this, but Mummy had told him it wasn’t polite to stare or make comments about people who were less fortunate than you were. He wasn’t sure if that still applied if the people were holding you prisoner. He thought maybe it didn’t.

A door opened and closed with a thud in the room outside. The man, Jack, coming back. Colin wondered if he’d brought food. They’d given him some bread and smelly cheese when he woke up, but he’d only been able to swallow a few mouthfuls.

“Christ, you took long enough.” Meg’s voice came from the other room. Colin squirmed against the pillow. He could see shadows on the wall through the crack in the door.

“I stopped at a tavern. Got to pass the time somehow. Didn’t think there’d be another message since he told us to sit tight this morning. Turns out I was wrong.”

“There was a message? Why didn’t you say so to begin with? Let me see.”

“Pipe down, woman, ten to one he’s just telling us to be patient. There’s no money with it. I checked.”

Colin heard the sound of a paper being ripped open. “There’s a card enclosed,” Meg said. “‘Just in case you think I don’t mean what I say.’ What the bloody hell—The rest is in that damned code. Got a pencil?”

“What the hell would I be doing with a pencil?”

“What indeed? It’s a bloody good thing for you I went to the parish school for a spell. His lordship wouldn’t’ve hired us unless one of us could read. Here we are.” The scratch of a pencil on paper followed.

“How’s the brat been?” Jack asked.

“Quiet. Someone taught him manners. Christ, Jack, you’ve had one too many pints.”

“You like me when I’m drunk.”

“No, I don’t. Damn it, Jack!” Meg gave a yelp of protest.

“Why not?” Jack said, in a funny, thick-sounding voice. “You must be bored out of your wits.”

“Your breath smells like stout.” A thud followed, as though Jack had fallen into a chair. “Anyway, the kid’s right next door.”

“So what?”

“You know I don’t like having an audience.”

“You turning into a mum?”

“Don’t be stupid, Jack.” Her voice was harsh, like sandpaper.

“Oh, hell, Meggie, I forgot about your own kid. I’m sorry.”

She was quiet for so long Colin thought she wasn’t going to answer. She drew in her breath with an odd sort of hitch, but when she spoke her voice sounded flat and ordinary. “I forget myself half the time.”

They fell silent. Then the sound of the pencil on paper stopped. “Oh, Christ.” Meg sounded as though she’d lost her breath for a moment. “God, he’s a sick bastard.”

“What?” Jack said.

She muttered something in a voice too low for Colin to hear. Jack let out a low whistle. “Not turning squeamish, are you?”

“Course not. But I don’t see the point—”

“That’s his lookout.” Jack’s heavy boots thudded on the floorboards. “Come on, let’s get it done.”

“I’ve a good mind not to.”

“Don’t be daft, Meg. He’d find out soon enough. We won’t get the blunt we were promised, let alone more, if we turn soft. Get a move on, will you, woman?”

“This wasn’t part of the agreement.” Her voice faded, as though she’d crossed the room.

“Damn it, Meg, we do what it takes to finish the job, same as always.”

“No!” Her voice bounced off the thin walls. Something in it sent a prickle of fear down Colin’s back.

“Jesus.” The boots thudded again. “I’ll do it myself, then.”

“Wait a minute, Jack.” Meg’s lighter footsteps hurried after him. “Hell. Bloody, bloody hell.” She drew a rasping breath. “All right, if it’s got to be done, let’s make sure it’s done proper-like. Do we have any more laudanum? No? Then where’s the brandy?”

They appeared in the doorway a moment later. Jack had his hands behind his back, as though he was hiding something. Meg’s gaze moved over Colin’s face. She didn’t look angry, but something in her eyes made Colin want to crawl under the bed. He would have, if it wasn’t for the leg shackle. As it was, he inched back as far as he could against the spiky iron headboard.

Meg stood there for a long moment, long enough for his heart to start pounding again. Then she walked toward him. She had a bottle in her hand. She pulled out the cork. It had a strong, raw sort of smell. “Drink, brat. Bottoms up. Trust me, love, it’ll make what’s coming that much easier.”

Colin took a sip and gagged. It didn’t taste like the stuff they’d given him in the cart. It burned his throat like hot coals.

Meg tipped the bottle up and forced the rest down his throat. Then she looked over her shoulder at Jack. “Don’t stand there with your mouth hanging open. Let’s get the bleeding thing over with.”