by Tracy Grant
“Christ, Mel. After all you’ve been through, haven’t you learned that we can’t any of us start again? I may have been a fool to marry you, but I can’t erase the past seven years.” He looked at the watercolor, a painting Mélanie had done of the stream on their Perthshire estate. The cool grays and mossy greens always brought an ache of longing to his throat. “What were you proposing to do? Hire some half-pay officer to get caught in bed with you?”
She regarded him with that unblinking courage he knew so well. “If that’s what it takes.”
His hand clenched with the impulse to wipe that look from her face. “You may be willing to put the children through that. I’m not.”
She swallowed. She was either too brave or not brave enough to leave it there. “Then—”
The image of the watercolor wavered before his eyes. He had a vivid memory of Mélanie picking her way over the mossy stones of the stream bank with Colin while he followed with Jessica on his shoulders. He looked into her eyes and said what he hadn’t yet articulated even to himself. “I don’t know if I can go on living with you, Mel. A marriage based on preserving appearances would drive us both mad. But if you think I’d keep you from the children, you know me even less than I knew you. Shall we go? The carriage awaits.”
Chapter 23
C olin sat hunched against the iron headboard, his right hand cradled in his left. He wasn’t sure how long he had sat thus, without moving. His right hand throbbed, as if it had been slammed in a door, only much, much worse. The bandage Meg had put over it was stiff with dried blood. The room had a sour smell. He’d been sick when they cut him. Meg had changed the sheets, but the smell wouldn’t go away.
No one had ever hurt him before. Not on purpose. Well, Billy Lydgate had punched him in the arm once, but he’d been mad because Colin had eaten the last custard tart, so Colin could sort of understand it. Meg and Jack hadn’t been mad. They’d stood there so calmly. Colin had been scared when Jack pulled out the knife, but even then he hadn’t understood. When Meg held his hand down and Jack slashed the knife across his skin, he’d been so shocked he hadn’t felt the pain. Not at first. Then it had hurt awfully.
He’d screamed and fought and kicked. Jack had held him down while Meg bandaged his hand. She’d kept saying she was sorry, that they’d had to do it. When someone said they were sorry, you were supposed to forgive them, but there must be a limit, mustn’t there? Colin wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to forgive Meg and Jack.
“Christ.” Jack’s voice came from the other room. It made Colin jump. “I’m going to the tavern.”
“You bloody idiot,” Meg said. “You’ll get us caught.”
“Better than watching you mope. You’d think you’d never seen a knife turned on anyone.”
“Not on a kid, I haven’t.”
“Jesus.” The wall shook as though Jack had struck it with his fist. Colin’s heart leapt into his throat. “You think I liked hacking up the brat? Damned ugly work. But we knew it might come to worse than that when we started. Still could.”
“It’s different—”
“When the smell of blood gets up your nose?”
“When the kid’s right there in front of you.” The boards creaked as though Meg was pacing. “I always wondered how far I could go. Now I’m not bloody sure I want to find out.”
“Look, Meggie—”
“Get out of here, before I hit you myself.”
“Like to see you try.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
The door slammed shut.
Colin retched again, but there was nothing left in his stomach to come out. The remnants of the brandy scratched his throat. His face screwed up as though he was crying, but no tears came. They seemed to be bottled up somewhere inside him. He was shaking so badly he thought he’d fall into pieces. He curled into a ball and hugged his hand against his chest. A single word came from his throat, muffled by the pillow.
“Mummy.”
The familiar low moan of distress jerked Charles from slumber. He sat up, reached for Mélanie, and tumbled onto a hard, swaying floor. He caught himself on one elbow. Pain shot through his leg. The vibration of wheels rumbled through the floorboards. The traveling chaise. Colin. Helen Trevennen. Brighton. He’d been sprawled on the backward-facing seat beside Edgar.
Mélanie moaned again, a quiet sound but one to which his senses had long been tuned. Moonlight slanted through the carriage windows. He could see the outline of her body twisting beneath the carriage rug on the seat opposite. In another minute, she’d awaken with a scream. He crawled across the floor, bumping his knee against the charcoal brazier. “Mel.” He reached up and gripped her shoulder. “Sweetheart, you’re dreaming.”
She started and sat up, though he knew from experience that she wasn’t awake yet. He pulled himself onto the seat and put his arm round her to keep her from falling. Her shoulders shook and her chest heaved. “Wake up, Mel.” He put his mouth against her temple. Her forehead was damp with sweat. “I’m here. You’re safe.”
Her stillness told him that she had woken. He could almost hear the stifled scream that caught in her throat.
He slid his hand to the familiar place at the nape of her neck. The carriage jolted over the rutted road. Charcoal smoke from the brazier drifted through the damp air. Edgar snored softly on the seat opposite, but then his brother had always been able to sleep through anything. In boyhood Charles had had to resort to pitchers of cold water to wake him.
Mélanie sucked in deep drafts of air. “I’m sorry. I’m all right now.” She started to pull away.
He wrapped his arms round her and sank back into the corner of the carriage. “It’s bad.” He peeled strands of sweat-soaked hair from her neck. “But not as bad as whatever you were dreaming.”
She lifted her head. “Charles—”
“There’s nothing we can do until we get there.” He let his fingers drift through her hair, heedless of the pins. “Sleep if you can.”
Her head fell into the hollow of his shoulder. He pulled the folds of his greatcoat round her and shifted his arm, settling her against him. It was a scene they had played out dozens of times, in their bed at home, in inns and lodgings and camps, even once or twice in carriages. He remembered the first time, in the Cantabrian Mountains, the night after the ambush. He hadn’t known the warning signs then. He’d been wakened by a full-throated scream. He’d crawled across the rocky ground and gathered her terror-wracked body into his arms, feeling stiff and unsuited to such an action. He could still recall the desperation in the way her fingers had clenched his shirt.
He’d never asked her to describe the nightmares and she’d never talked about them. He’d thought he knew their substance well enough. Anyone who’d been through what Mélanie had been through had more than enough demons to face in the night.
Only she hadn’t been through it, at least not what he’d thought she’d been through. The French soldiers who killed her parents and the bandits who attacked her and Blanca in the mountains had been merely part of her cover story, designed to rouse his chivalrous instincts. And yet he’d stake his life that the nightmares were real, all of them. In that small corner of their marriage, at least, she had not been pretending.
He kept sifting through what he had learned about her, as though if he could just put the pieces in the right order, he could find the key to deciphering who she was, this woman he had given himself to, this woman he’d believed he had known intimately. But whenever he thought he had begun to grasp the pattern, some new discovery would shake it to pieces.
He looked down at her, but the moon must have gone behind a cloud. He couldn’t see her face. Instead he put his lips against her hair, and stared into the dark silence of the night.
He thought she slept again. He dozed off himself for a bit. He came awake with a start as they pulled into the yard of the Star in Alfriston. Dawn was turning the inky sky a pale charcoal. The cobbled yard was congested—a mail coach, two post-chaises, thre
e private carriages, and a farm cart laden with cabbages. Randall opened the carriage door and poked his head in. It would be a good half hour before a fresh team was ready.
Mélanie sat up, jabbed the pins into her hair, and reached for her bonnet. “We might as well go in. We need to tend to our cuts and bruises.”
The timbered entrance hall was thronged with serving maids with jugs of hot water, post boys with tankards, and mail coach travelers gulping down mugs of milk and rum, but Mélanie had a way of drawing attention in a crowd. They were shown to a whitewashed parlor with a sturdy brick fireplace and a gateleg table, supplied with hot coffee, and promised a hearty breakfast as well as plentiful warm water.
Mélanie stripped off her gloves and untied the ribbons on her bonnet, then let out a groan. “Sacrebleu! My wits are deserting me. I forgot to ask them for some brandy or sherry to clean the cuts.” She dropped her bonnet on a chair and hurried from the room.
Edgar went to pour himself a cup of coffee. “I never thought we’d find ourselves visiting Aunt Frances in the midst of all this. I expect she’ll be as sharp-tongued as ever.”
“I expect she will,” Charles said. “But if there’s news of Helen Trevennen to be found in Brighton, she’ll make sure we find it.” He moved to the fireplace. “Just ignore Aunt Frances when she tries to shock you. It’s the most effective way to shut her up.”
Edgar grimaced. He took a sip of coffee, then glanced at the door. “I say, is Mélanie all right? I thought I heard something in the carriage.”
“She had a bad dream.” Charles held his hands out to the fire. “Not surprising in the circumstances.”
Edgar frowned into his coffee. “Is everything all right between the two of you?”
Charles turned his head to look his brother full in the face. “Considering that our son is missing, hacked with a knife, and threatened with worse—oh, yes, Mélanie and I are right as rain.”
Edgar met his gaze. “That isn’t what I meant. It’s just—I know I’m not good at reading such things and God knows we’re none of us acting normally, but something seems—well—different—between you.”
“What’s happened to Colin makes everything different.”
Edgar continued to look at him with a piercing gaze that held an unexpected echo of their mother in her rare moments of insight. “Perhaps I’ve no right to ask. But you do realize how lucky you are, don’t you, Charles? What you and Mélanie have—” He shook his head. “When you were first married, I couldn’t make sense of it. Half the time you don’t even act as one expects lovers to act. But every so often I’ll catch you looking at each other—just looking—and I feel like a voyeur for watching something so intimate. Most people never find what you and Mélanie have. And for those who do, it often doesn’t last.”
Charles stared into his brother’s clear, unshadowed blue eyes. “Thank you, Edgar.” He forced his voice to soften, though he could not quite keep the irony from it. “I’m well aware of my wife’s worth.”
Edgar set down his coffee cup and began to stir far more milk and sugar into it than he usually took. “I was convinced I was in love with Lydia when I married her. She was so lovely, so pure, so removed from all the horrors I’d seen in the war. So comfortingly sure of herself and her place in the world. She seemed to—well, to represent everything that was good about Britain.”
“Everything you’d been fighting for?”
“I suppose so. Yes. And then I looked at you…I think I thought—I hoped—I could find what you and Mélanie have. Laughable, isn’t it?”
“Not at all.”
“It didn’t last, of course. Or perhaps I only dreamed it into existence in the first place. We hadn’t been married six months before I realized we hadn’t two thoughts in common. What I thought was purity was coldness. What I thought was modesty was pride. Lydia decided it was time she was married and it suited her to be an officer’s wife. I was almost irrelevant to the equation.”
The puzzled frustration on Edgar’s face and in his voice was all too familiar. When they were boys, when Edgar still confided in his elder brother, Edgar routinely spilled his heart out to Charles about some girl he was convinced was the embodiment of all womanly perfection. Invariably, he would prove to be seeing the object of his affections more as he wished her to be than as she really was. When the first flush of infatuation faded and he woke up to the fact that the girl didn’t match his idealized image, he would fall out of love as quickly as he had fallen into it.
Was Mélanie right? Had Edgar ever put Kitty on a pedestal as he later had Lydia? Given the chance, would his chivalrous brother have taken Kitty to his bed, as Charles had done, or would he only have worshipped her from afar?
“Mother and Father didn’t set the best example of wedded bliss,” Charles said.
Edgar tensed at the mention of their parents. “That’s not—”
“Mother was bored and miserable with her life and found attractive men the best distraction. Father was addicted to winning and seduction was his favorite game. If there was a moment when they didn’t hate each other, it ended long before my earliest memories.” Charles had the familiar sensation of looking at his parents through the wrong end of a telescope. A bitter taste like a mouthful of burned coffee scalded his throat. “I’m sorry, Edgar, it’s not much of a heritage, but at least we survived after a fashion.”
Edgar grimaced and turned back to the window. “It didn’t exactly fit us for marriage, you mean? You’ve done well enough.”
Charles bit back a shout of bitter laughter. He remembered his father’s look of amazement on first meeting Mélanie. My compliments, my boy, he had said to Charles later, in the cool voice that rarely showed any emotion beyond boredom. A diamond of the first water. I wouldn’t have thought you had such taste. And she seems genuinely devoted to you. Though I understand from amateur theatricals that she’s proved herself an excellent actress.
Even Kenneth Fraser couldn’t have known how devastatingly accurate his assessment had been. And yet, Charles realized, for all the deceptions, he had known Mélanie’s strength and her courage and her intelligence from the first. One could argue that when they married he’d had a clearer image of the woman she was than Edgar had had of Lydia.
The opening of the door ended the silence that stretched between him and Edgar. Mélanie came into the room carrying a tray with a steaming bowl of water and a bottle of sherry. A serving maid followed, bearing a second tray laden with a nauseating amount of food.
“You two stay here,” Edgar said when the maid had withdrawn. “I think I’ll have something to eat in the coffee room.”
“But…Oh, I see.” Mélanie touched his arm. “Don’t you think it’s a little late to worry about my modesty? You can always turn your back when Charles changes the dressing.”
Edgar hesitated, then gave a crooked grin and squeezed her hand. “It won’t hurt for you to have a bit of time together.”
“What was that about?” Mélanie asked when the door closed behind him.
“He’s worried something’s wrong between us.”
“I told you he had flashes of perception.”
“Yes, but why he had to pick this of all times to display them—” Charles passed a hand over his eyes. They ached, possibly from lack of sleep, though he suspected there were other reasons. “We’d been talking about our parents and about Lydia.”
Mélanie began to unhook her pelisse. “Oh, dear. Not the most comfortable topics.”
“No.” He dropped his hand and blinked to recover his focus. “Edgar’s always fallen in and out of love with great ease. But marriage is damnably irrevocable.”
Mélanie’s fingers stilled on the bands of ruby velvet that ran down the front of her pelisse. “Yes, it is, isn’t it?”
He looked into her eyes. Wisps of dark hair clung to her cheeks and neck. Her high-standing velvet collar was crushed on one side where he’d held her in the carriage.
Mélanie returned his gaze, then shrug
ged out of the pelisse and laid it over a chair back. She opened her valise and took out a roll of lint. “Do we tend to your injuries first or mine?”
She changed the dressing on his wound first. Blood had seeped through the stitches and matted the dressing to his skin, which made the process of taking the bandage off tiresome and more than a little uncomfortable. But the blood, Mélanie reported as she cleaned the wound with sherry, was bright red, with no sign of infection.
Other than that, she said little as she fitted a fresh bandage over the stitches and fastened it in place. Neither of them referred to her nightmare nor to the mutilation Colin had suffered and the risk of infection their son ran if his own wound was not being tended to properly.
The cut in Mélanie’s side was still raw and red, but there was no sign of swelling. She sat on the settle before the fire, her gaze on the flames, while he removed the bandage. And then, without looking at him, she broke the silence with a single word. “Lescaut.”
He turned from the table, a length of lint in his hands. “What?”
“My real name. Mélanie Suzanne Lescaut.”
Charles looked at his wife. Her profile was outlined against the firelight, stripped down to the essentials of flesh and bone. The features he could mold from memory, which could glow with innocence or sensuality or piercing intelligence. The smooth skin, the soft, ironic lips, the changeable eyes. “How did your father and sister die?” he said.
She turned to look at him. Her eyes had the turbulent emptiness of the sea after a storm.
“The nightmares weren’t part of the deception,” he said.
“No. The nightmares weren’t part of the deception.” She turned back to the fire. She had taken off her gown and chemise so he could tend to the wound. He’d draped a blanket round her, but her right shoulder was exposed, a bare, vulnerable curve. “I used to be able to control them,” she said. “The nightmares. I only had them when I slept alone, or sometimes with Blanca or—”