by Tracy Grant
“Yes?” she stared at him, willing him to give her the coup de grâce.
“Damn it, Mélanie—” He caught himself up short, breathing hard, like a winded boxer. “Christ, listen to us. I thought I’d had my fill of parents who put their own problems before their children.”
The anger drained from her body, leaving her sick with guilt and disgust. “You’re right. If you’d known the truth about the ring, you’d have taken Carevalo’s threats seriously and Colin wouldn’t have been taken.”
He fixed his gaze on a faded print of a waterfall on the wall opposite. “I should have taken Carevalo more seriously, regardless. That’s my sin.”
That last word hit her like a blow. “If it wasn’t for me—”
“No sense repining on the past. Not now.” He strode across the room again, stirring a cloud of dust from the threadbare red carpet. “In a sense it doesn’t matter who was behind the attack. It doesn’t change our objective. We have to find the ring, only now we have the added complication that we have to manage not to get killed while doing so.”
She picked up her sandwich and stared at the thin, crustless triangle. What were they feeding Colin? Were they feeding him at all? She forced down a wave of nausea. “At least we should be able to find Helen’s sister at the Gilded Lily.”
“And we can only hope she’s not as estranged from Helen as their uncle thinks.” Charles prowled about the room, picked up another sandwich, set it down untasted. “Before we go to the Gilded Lily, we should stop by Bow Street and see Roth.”
“And tell him about the attack?”
“It’s possible he can learn something about Iago Lorano. And it won’t hurt to have more people hunting for Helen Trevennen. He can have someone help Addison and Blanca with the inquiries among the jewelers.” He picked up a spool of thread from the tray with the bandages. “Give me your pelisse. I’ll mend the rent. If you keep it fastened, your gown will be all right.” He held the needle up to the meager light from the window and threaded it.
She moved, with care, to the edge of the chair and eased the pelisse out from under her. “Charles. You realize the fact that no one’s heard from Helen Trevennen in seven years could mean she’s dead?”
“It could.” He took the pelisse from her, dropped down in a ladderback chair beside the window, and began to stitch up the rent made by the knife. “But she had the ring, and the quickest way to find it is to find out what happened to her.” He held out the pelisse. “There. It might not pass muster with Blanca, but it’ll do from a distance. Can you walk?”
“It’s my side that’s hurt, Charles. My legs are fine.” She stood up quickly to convince him and regretted the motion at once. But as long as she didn’t move her right arm too much, the pain was tolerable.
Charles slipped the pelisse over her arms and did up the frogged clasps that ran down the front. “Do you want more brandy?” he asked. “Or some laudanum?”
“Stop fussing, darling. Just put my bonnet back on.”
He looked at her for a moment, then set the bonnet on her head and tied the ribbons. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “don’t you think it’s a bit ridiculous to go on calling me darling?”
“I can’t help it,” she said, an unexpected lump in her throat. “It’s the way I think of you.”
Charles went to open the door without making any reply.
Chapter 14
T he 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 ha
d 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.”