Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  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.”

  Chapter 8

  A shutter slammed shut in Charles’s brain, leaving him in a sick, black void. You married a French spy. The words echoed in his head, but his bruised, battered mind refused to comprehend them. Then his vision cleared and he was looking at his wife’s familiar face. Because her words made no sense at face value, he sought for the logical explanation that must exist. At any other time, he would have thought she was joking, but not now. Not with their son in jeopardy. “Then you’d better tell me about it,” he said.

  The light pouring through the windows fell across Mélanie’s face with crystalline, autumnal purity. “We’d heard the ring had been found and that an English diplomat was being sent to fetch it. We knew how valuable it could be. Blanca and I hid in that mountain pass for three days waiting to intercept you.”

  Charles scoured her face with his gaze. The features he could mold with his fingers from memory. The eyes he had let see into his soul. The mouth whose taste was as familiar as air. “How did they make you do it?” he said. “Did your family not die after all? Were the French holding one of them hostage? Or was it something else?”

  She shook her head. Sweat beaded her forehead and plastered strands of dark hair to her skin. “Oh, Charles. Oh, my sweet. Sometimes I forget how quick you are. But you’re reasoning under a false assumption. You think there must be an explanation that exonerates me. And there isn’t.”

  “Or you think there isn’t.” He took her chin in his hand. “Tell me the rest, Mel.”

  The pulse in her throat hammered against his fingers. “I wasn’t blackmailed, Charles. I wasn’t coerced. Make your mind up to that now. We don’t have time for self-deception.”

  Her eyes were dark and opaque, as though she was afraid to let him inside. He sought for a way to breach the wall she had erected between them. That it could be breached he had no doubt. “Who sent you to fetch the ring?” he asked.

  She hesitated the barest fraction of a second. “Raoul O’Roarke.”

  He dropped his hand from her face. “You’re telling me O’Roarke was a French agent?”

  “He wasn’t just an agent. He ran a network that covered half of Spain. A lot of his people were infiltrated into the resistance. As he was himself.”

  “So instead of fighting for Spanish freedom he betrayed his comrades to the French?”

  A hint of challenge flashed in her gaze. “Raoul wouldn’t put it that way. He wanted a new Spain. He thought the best hope for it lay with Bonaparte.”

  The puzzle pieces shifted and fell into place in his head. Loyalties and alliances in the Peninsula had been as complex as a multifaceted gem. A lot of Spanish intellectuals had supported the French occupation as the quickest route to progressive reform. O’Roarke, with his liberal principles and his Irish heritage, would have had reason enough to side with the French against Britain. It fit. It fit all too damnably well. But how the man had managed to acquire a hold on Mélanie—

  “Charles.” Mélanie seized his face between her hands. Her fingers trembled, but her gaze pinned him like a lance. “Raoul was a French agent. I was a French agent. I committed a great crime against you when I married you. I don’t expect you ever to forgive me. But right now it doesn’t matter. All that matters is what this means for Colin.”

  Her eyes bored into his own. They stared at each other for a moment that seemed at once as slow as torture and as brief as a musket shot.

  Realization slammed into him like a punch to the gut. He pulled away from her, crossed the room, and smashed his fist into the wall.

  The sea-green plaster gave way beneath the force of his blow. His knuckles struck a beam. He pulled his hand free of the ruined plaster and walked to the door. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” Mélanie came after him.


  He didn’t look at her. He might never be able to look at her again. He turned the door handle. “To see Raoul O’Roarke again and find out just how much he really knows about Carevalo and the ring he tried to have you steal seven years ago.”

  “Charles.” Mélanie caught his hand as he strode through the door.

  He jerked away. His hand clenched. He came closer to striking her than he would have imagined possible. “What?”

  “Your hand’s bleeding.” She held out her handkerchief.

  He glanced down at his ragged knuckles. The gash was dripping blood onto the rose and cream of the carpet. He tugged his own handkerchief from his sleeve and wound it round his hand.

  “Charles, listen, there’s more, that’s why I had to—”

  He strode to the stairs without listening. Mélanie ran after him. Michael’s voice echoed up from the entrance hall. “If you’ll wait a moment, sir, I’ll inquire if Mr. and Mrs. Fraser are at home.”

  “Thank you.”

  Two words, but the voice was unmistakable. Charles had heard it in Mivart’s Hotel scarcely an hour before, denying any knowledge of Colin’s disappearance. He’d actually taken O’Roarke at his word. Then.

  He rounded the first-floor landing and took the rest of the stairs in a half-dozen strides.

  O’Roarke, now formally attired in a dark gray coat and flawless cravat, was standing beside the console table where callers left cards. He lifted his head and met Charles’s gaze. His face was still and intent, as though he was searching for something. Understanding flashed in his eyes. For a raw, angry moment, anything might have happened. If the air between them had been made of a solid substance, it would have been smashed to bits by the crossfire.

  Charles couldn’t have said what checked his impulse to violence. The training of a lifetime. The memory that his daughter was upstairs. The need to maintain some sort of control. He jerked his head toward a pair of double doors across the hall. “Come into the library.”

  He crossed the hall without waiting for an answer and flung open the doors. O’Roarke followed. So did Mélanie. Charles stood to the side until they were both in the room. Somehow, beneath the black knot of rage that filled his brain, he knew that he couldn’t speak until the doors to the hall were closed.

  He pulled the doors to behind Mélanie, then turned to face her and the man she now claimed to have been working for. The light from the tall windows slanted across their faces. Mélanie’s face stood out parchment-white amid the golden oak and brown velvet of the room. O’Roarke’s gaze was veiled and friendly once again, as though he were no more than a concerned bystander.

  “I know what a great shock your son’s disappearance has been, Fraser,” O’Roarke said.

  “You can spare the playacting.” Charles pressed his shoulders against the solid oak of the doors in an effort to stop himself from crossing the room and throttling them both. “She’s told me the whole.”

  “I see.” O’Roarke nodded, a man accepting the inevitable and making the necessary transition. “I feared as much. That’s why I came.”

  Mélanie crossed to O’Roarke’s side in two strides, the pale blue folds of her gown whipping round her legs. “Did you know about what happened to Colin, Raoul?” She dragged him round to face her. “Did you?” She gripped his face between her hands, as she had gripped Charles just a short time ago. “Because if you did, so help me God I’ll cut off your balls and stuff them down your throat.”

  “Why would I be fool enough to abet Carevalo, querida? I know better than anyone that you never had the ring.”

  Mélanie’s fingers pressed into his skin. “That isn’t a straight answer.”

  “Would you believe me if I gave you a straight answer?”

  “No. But I want one anyway, damn you.”

  He lifted a gloved hand and brushed his fingers against her cheek. “I wouldn’t hurt your son, Mélanie. I wouldn’t be party to any plot that did. I think you know that.”

  Mélanie’s gaze raked his face. “You bloody bastard.” She released him and took a step back. “I can almost always tell when you’re lying. Almost. But not without fail.”

  O’Roarke looked straight into her eyes. “No one can tell that without fail, querida.”

  Charles pushed himself away from the doors, knocking against a table that held a chess game he and Mélanie had been playing. “Was Carevalo one of your creatures, too?”

  “Carevalo a French agent?” O’Roarke gave a shout of laughter that echoed off the coffered ceiling. “Christ, no.” He put up a hand to straighten his cravat. Mélanie’s fingers had left red marks on his skin. “How much has she told you?”

  Charles strode to a walnut armchair that had once belonged to his grandfather and gripped its high back. “You were a French agent. So was she.”

  “That’s it in a nutshell.” O’Roarke’s gaze flickered to Charles’s bandaged hand, then back to his face. “You were an agent of the British yourself.”

  “I did the occasional fetching and carrying. I fear I was a rank amateur compared to you and my wife.”

  “You underrate yourself, Fraser.”

  Charles’s grip on the chair tightened. The carved tracery pressed into his hands. “You sent Mélanie to intercept me and steal the Carevalo Ring.”

  “There’s more, Charles,” Mélanie said. “That’s what I was trying to tell you on the stairs. According to our informant, one of the British soldiers in your party had the ring all along. He set up the exchange with the bandits as a cover to extort money for the ring.”

  Charles stared at her. “Who the hell was your informant?”

  “The mistress of one of the bandits.” Mélanie glanced at O’Roarke. “You were the one she talked to. What did she say?”

  “That a British soldier had somehow got possession of the ring. He knew the British would never pay him for it. So he hired the bandits to pretend they had it.”

  Mélanie turned back to Charles. “That must be why the bandits were hiding in the trees the morning of the attack. They arrived early to collect the ring from the British soldier so they could sell it to you at the rendezvous a few hours later.”

  Charles closed his eyes for a moment. “Who was the British soldier?”

  “I don’t know,” O’Roarke said. “The bandit’s mistress didn’t know his name.”

  “Was he an officer or an enlisted man?”

  “She didn’t know anything about him, save that he was British and a soldier.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Why would I lie about it at this point?”

  “Probably just for the hell of it,” Charles said. He remembered, with sickening clarity, that he used to like this man. “Who the devil are you working for now?”

  “For Spain. For a government with some belief in the rights of man. Not to mention women,” he added with a glance at Mélanie. “During the war the best hope for that lay with Bonaparte. Now it lies with supporting Carevalo and his friends against the monarchy.”

  “I take it Carevalo doesn’t know you worked for the Bonapartists?”

  “Carevalo the French-hater? No, and God help me if he ever learns the truth.” O’Roarke stripped off his gloves and tossed them onto the marble library table. “Mélanie has given you the power to ruin me in Spain. I’m sure you realize that. There’s little point in discussing it. You’ll come to your own decision one way or another.”

  “At the moment I don’t give a damn about your future, O’Roarke. All that concerns me is my son.” Charles strode toward the other man. “You say you’d have no reason to take Colin because you know we don’t have the ring. But you could scarcely tell Carevalo that. So if Carevalo confided his plan to you, you’d have little choice but to go along with it.”

  “Well reasoned, Fraser. But as it happens, he didn’t confide in me. I think he knows I find his obsession with the ring rather juvenile.”

  “And yet you went to great lengths to recover it seven year
s ago.”

  “Oh, I can’t deny its power as a symbol. I won’t say it would have turned the war in our favor if we’d got our hands on it seven years ago, but it certainly wouldn’t have hurt.”

  “We’re not talking about seven years ago.”

  “No.” The light from the windows emphasized the circles beneath O’Roarke’s eyes, the hollows of his cheeks, the long, sharp line of his nose. He looked older than he had a few moments before. “I’m not without sympathy for your fears, Fraser. If I’d had any inkling that Carevalo meant mischief for the boy, I’d have warned Mélanie. You’ll have to take my word for that.”

  “Why the hell would I take your word for anything?”

  O’Roarke turned to look at Mélanie, and she returned his gaze in a kind of silent duel. The fire crackled in the grate. The long-case clock ticked with precision.

  “We can’t take Raoul’s word for anything,” Mélanie said at last, her gaze still fixed on O’Roarke. “You can never be sure of what another person might be capable of doing. Raoul told me that, and you said it yourself only today. But I don’t think Raoul would hurt Colin.”

  Charles looked from O’Roarke to his wife. The sunlight fell between them in a glittering arc. Their profiles, set with twin determination, were reflected in the glass-fronted bookcase on the wall behind. “Why?” he said.

  Mélanie drew in her breath, then released it. O’Roarke watched her, as though waiting for a cue.

  “Because he’s Colin’s father,” Mélanie said.

  Chapter 9

  O f course. Of course. Of course. The obviousness of it pummeled him, a series of blows he should have seen coming. But he was so used to thinking of Colin as his son that he rarely considered who had performed the biological act.

  The library was suspended in stillness. The sunlight burnished the oak and velvet and struck sparks off the gilded book spines. The smell of ink and leather hung in the air with pungent familiarity. Books had been his retreat since boyhood. Now even this haven proved to be one more chamber in the house of cards that was his home.