Secrets of a Lady (aka Daughter of the Game)

London
November 1819

“Suppose Carevalo’s right, damn his eyes,” Charles said. “Suppose the French soldiers didn’t make off with the ring.”

Mélanie turned her head to look at her husband. His voice was level, almost conversational, but the light slanting through the carriage window glanced off his clenched hands. His knuckles were white. She could see him sifting through the pieces of the past, rearranging them in his head, searching for a break in the pattern. She had been doing the same herself since they left Raoul O’Roarke at Mivart’s Hotel scarcely ten minutes ago. Save that for her, the picture was different.

She put her hand over her abdomen, flat again—how proud she had been of it, how inconsequential it now seemed—nearly three years after Jessica’s birth. For all the danger seven years ago, at least Colin had been with them, tucked safely inside her.

She reached for Charles’s hand. “Perhaps you were right that it was a wild-goose chase and that the bandits never had the ring. It was all a trick to lure you into the mountains so they could steal the gold.”

“Perhaps. But one of them did have something hidden in that pouch round his neck. Which brings us back to the French dragoons. Unless one of our own party somehow managed to steal it after the fight. Baxter, Blanca, you, or me. Addison couldn’t have moved with his leg.” Charles laced his fingers through her own. She could feel the warmth of his hand through the ecru kid of her glove. “Well, mo chridh?” he said. “Are you hiding it in your jewel box?”

She managed a smile, but it turned wobbly. “I wish to God I were.”

He stared down at their clasped hands. “Suppose Blanca stumbled across the dead bandits when you sent her to the stream for water after the French soldiers ran off.”

“Blanca might rip the shirts off a pair of live men, but she’d scream bloody murder at the sight of dead ones. And she wouldn’t steal.”

“You can’t know that, Mel.” His fingers tightened round her own. “You can never really know what another person might be capable of.”

Beneath the velvet of her pelisse and the sarcenet of her gown and the linen of her chemise, her insides twisted, as if someone had turned a knife in her gut. “No,” she said. “I suppose not. What about Baxter?”

“I don’t see how he’d have had time. Unless the ring wasn’t in the pouch after all, and Baxter found it later, when we were burying the bodies. I still think the likeliest explanation is that the French soldiers made off with the ring and disposed of it for their own purposes.”

She drew in her breath. The air in the carriage was close and choking, thick with the smell of Charles’s shaving soap and her perfume and the smoke from the charcoal brazier at their feet.

“Stiffen up your sinews, my sweet,” Charles said. “I’ll talk to d’Arnot at the French embassy. He has contacts among the former Bonapartist officers. If Carevalo traced the dragoons, we can, too.”

“I should think so. In half the time.” She made her voice light, but panic closed tight round her heart. Her free hand curled into a fist, so hard she heard a stitch give way in her glove. She had an impulse to smash her hand through the watered-silk upholstery, the polished mahogany fittings, the plate-glass window. “Oh, God, darling, I want him back. I’d give anything—”

“So would I,” Charles said. Blue shadows of fatigue drew at his face. He had looked like that on the night of the battle of Waterloo, when their house in Brussels shook from cannon fire and the hall was filled with wounded soldiers. And on the nights Colin and Jessica had been born, when he’d sat beside her, in defiance of custom. He’d held her hand then, too.

She had a sudden memory of how Colin had felt when the doctor first placed him in her arms, so small and insubstantial, with a wobbly head and squirmy limbs. Charles had reached out and cupped his hand round the baby’s head. The warmth and wonder on his face had brought tears to her eyes.

“We’ll talk to Blanca and Addison,” Charles said, in the voice of an outnumbered commander recounting a desperate battle plan with calm certainty. “We’ll call on Baxter. We’ll go to the French embassy and talk to d’Arnot.”

She nodded, only half hearing, because she had come to her own decision. She was going to have to tell Charles the truth, all of it. She had known that from the moment they read Carevalo’s letter, though she hadn’t fully admitted it until now.

She was not as sick or terrified at the prospect as she ought to be. Perhaps her fear for Colin left little room for other emotions. If they could get him back, nothing else mattered. And they were not going to get him back unless Charles learned the truth.

She looked up at her husband. The familiar, ironic eyes, the full, generous mouth, the thick hair that would never quite lie smooth. She remembered the moment he had proposed to her, on a chill December night on a balcony overlooking the Tagus River. She had thought then that he was mad. She had wondered if he would ever be able to think of himself as Colin’s father. She had been a fool. Charles was the sanest man she knew, and once he gave his loyalty, he was unswerving. His capacity for love was a well she had not plumbed the depths of.

Yet.

Blanca sprang to her feet, poplin skirts snapping. “How can you accuse me of such a thing? You think I am a thief? You think I have no honor?”

Mélanie crossed the small salon and took the younger woman by the hands. “We’re not accusing you, querida. We’re asking a question. We have to be sure, for Colin’s sake.”

Outrage, fear, and compassion flickered across Blanca’s face. She let out a sigh that ruffled the muslin collar of her gown and made her hands tremble. “I’m sorry, Mélanie.” She rarely called Mélanie by her given name when Charles was present. It was a sign of how greatly her composure had been shaken. She looked straight into Mélanie’s eyes. “I didn’t take the ring. I wouldn’t have even if I’d seen the dead bandits. And I never saw them.”

Mélanie squeezed Blanca’s hands. Her gaze went to the Meissen clock on the mantel. The filigree hands inexorably marked the time she had already allowed to slip by since her son’s disappearance. It was twenty-five minutes past seven. Four hours since they had learned Colin was missing. Longer since he had been taken. Less than five days until Carevalo’s Saturday-night deadline.

Blanca was looking past Mélanie at Charles. “I may only have been fifteen. But I gave you my word. I do not go back on my word.”

“I know, Blanca.” Charles gave her one of his smiles that were as warm as a cashmere shawl and as fortifying as a glass of whisky. “But we’ve had to question all our assumptions about the people we know. I thought I knew Carevalo. I couldn’t have been more disastrously mistaken.”

Mélanie returned to the settee, and Blanca moved back to the sofa.

“Sir?” Addison was standing beside the sofa. He had been sitting next to Blanca but had punctiliously risen to his feet when she did. “Don’t you want to ask if I took it?”

“You’re a remarkable man, Addison, but slipping out of the clearing and dodging through the trees with a broken leg seems beyond even your capabilities.”

“I could have been pretending about the broken leg.”

“So you could. Were you?”

“No,” said Addison, in precisely the same tone. “And I didn’t take the ring. Though I was probably the only one of the party who knew we were in the mountains to fetch it.”

“There was speculation among the soldiers?” Charles asked.

“Constantly. The odds-on favorite theory was that you were delivering the gold to support a surprise attack on the French garrison at Palencia. But there was also some talk about funneling the gold to British agents, and a rather ingenious theory that the bandits were blackmailing either Wellington or the ambassador over an amorous intrigue. I don’t think the lieutenant believed any of the stories.”

“Jennings?” Charles perched on the arm of the settee and rested his hand on Mélanie’s shoulder. His fingers were as cold and tense as she felt inside. “Why not?”

Addison seated himself on the sofa again, carefully smoothing the creases from his trousers. Unlike Blanca, whose hair was only half pinned up and whose gown wasn’t buttoned properly, he looked as immaculate as ever, his linen spotless, his pale hair combed smooth, his pearl-gray coat without a wrinkle. “Jennings kept himself aloof from the men,” he said at last. “Well, he would, he was an officer. But I’d catch him watching you sometimes, sir, with an odd look in his eyes. If I had to put a name to it, I’d call it calculating.”

“Jennings asked me outright about the reasons for the mission,” Charles said, “though I don’t think he really expected an answer. He didn’t care much for having to play nursemaid to a civilian.”

“Jennings was a clumsy oaf.” Blanca leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and scowled at the shiny black toes of her shoes. “Oh, his face was nice enough and the rest of him wasn’t bad, either, but he was too quick and he didn’t have the least idea what to do with his hands.”

Addison swung his head round to stare at Blanca. “Good God,” he said after a moment. “Do you mean you let Jennings—”

Blanca straightened up and shrugged, though she avoided meeting Addison’s gaze. “I told you he had a nice face. And you were refusing to so much as touch my hand.”

“But you’d just been—” Addison swallowed. His face was even more bloodless than usual.

Blanca flushed. “That was war.” She lifted her chin and looked him straight in the eye. “I wanted pleasure to erase it.”

Their gazes locked. It was Addison who looked away, his own cheeks stained with color. Under normal circumstances, he and Blanca kept up a scrupulous pretense of being no more than friends when Charles and Mélanie were present.

Charles was silent for a tactful moment. “Did Jennings say anything to you about the ring, Blanca?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t talk much at all. He had other things on his mind.”

Charles looked from her to Addison. “What about Sergeant Baxter? Do you remember how long he was out of the clearing when we were putting things to rights after the attack?”

Addison shook his head. “Everyone was milling about. I don’t think any of you were gone for long.”

Blanca folded her arms over her chest. “Baxter is a nice man. He wouldn’t steal.”

Addison stared at a bit of lint on his coat, as though somehow it held an answer. “Baxter has a tavern now. In Covent Garden. Called the Thistle. I visit it occasionally.”

“Yes, I know,” Charles said. “I stopped by once myself just after he opened it. He must have had some capital to start a tavern.”

“A legacy from an uncle of Mrs. Baxter’s, I understand.” Addison flicked the lint from his coat. “For what it’s worth, Baxter mentioned the legacy to me on the journey into the mountains, before he could have known of the ring, let alone planned to steal it. I assume you’ll want to visit the tavern, sir. You know the direction?”

“In Henrietta Street. Near the Piazza.” Charles squeezed Mélanie’s shoulder. “We can call at the French embassy and see d’Arnot on the way.”

Mélanie nodded. She remained where she was while Charles walked to the door with Blanca and Addison. The smell of cinnamon and cloves washed over her, a potpourri she’d arranged for autumn. Her own face and the faces of her children looked down at her from the painting over the mantel. She stared at the sunny, luminous image. Why was it that the most perfect pictures always shattered the most easily? Once she spoke the words, there would be no going back, for either of them. Like the loss of virginity, which could take one from maiden to harlot in one clean stroke.

She recalled a moment from a visit to their Scottish estate last spring. She had stood on the gravel walk, watching Colin and Jessica race across the lawn in the fading light of early evening. The sky was a heavy gray smudged with charcoal. A curl of mist hovered between the mountains, and snowcapped peaks shimmered in the distance. The crisp wind tugged at her skirt and pushed her hair back from her face, the clean air filled her lungs, the prospect of a quiet candlelit dinner lay before her. She had thought that in that moment she was perfectly happy.

Charles closed the door, and they were alone in the room. The time had come. She swallowed, drew a breath, and twisted her wedding ring once round her finger. “Before we go, darling, there’s something I have to tell you.”

Charles was halfway to the bellpull. “We can talk in the carriage.”

“No.” She was on her feet. “This needs to be said here.”

Many men would have objected. Being Charles, he didn’t. Instead, he crossed back to her side, close enough that she could see the circles beneath his eyes, the stubble on his chin, the laugh lines that bracketed his mouth.

“What is it, mo chridh?” He reached out as though to take her hands.

She pulled away. He stood watching her, his face dark with concern.

A film of perspiration dampened her palms. Absurd on a November morning. She had a mad impulse to go up and see Jessica, to hold their little girl in her arms, before she told him. She was being a fool. In the end, the only way to do it was as simply as possible. “The French soldiers didn’t make off with the ring, Charles.” The words seemed to scrape against her throat as she spoke them. “It never found its way into French hands.”

Surprise filled his face, followed by confusion, and then a search for answers. “How do you know?”

She forced herself to look straight into his eyes. “I had it on the best authority. French Intelligence.”

“I see.” He studied her for a moment. “And how did you happen to be in the confidence of Bonaparte’s agents?”

It was the tone of a man who loved his wife and didn’t doubt her. Had never doubted her. Never could. Or so he thought.

She drew a breath. Her chest hurt. Her throat felt raw. “Because they confide in their own. Because I was one of them. Because, my darling, you married a French spy.”