by Tracy Grant
Her fingers stirred in his own. “Charles?”
“Yes?”
“Whatever happens, don’t let Jessica be stifled. Give her an education, let her travel, give her an independent income. Make her as free as a woman can be.”
The speech at first seemed a complete non sequitur. But in light of their whole conversation, perhaps it was not. “Of course.” He squeezed her hand. “We’ve always agreed about that.”
“If I’m not there.” She stared at the smoke-blackened iron of the hob grate. “Promise.”
The intensity in her voice shook him as much as her words. “I told you I wouldn’t take the children away from you.”
“Yes. But—”
He gripped her hand tightly, as though he could anchor both of them to safety. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, Mel.”
She turned her gaze to him. Her eyes held visions of a future he would not let himself contemplate. “You can’t possibly know that, Charles. We were both almost killed today.” Her voice turned low and urgent. “Promise.”
A pain closed round his chest that was not rage but fear. He looked into her eyes and inclined his head. “I promise.”
Chapter 24
M élanie drew a steadying breath and forced her hands to unclench for the third time since she and Charles and Edgar had been shown into the blue parlor of Frances Dacre-Hammond’s house in Brighton. Edgar was staring at the fire grate, as though if he looked hard enough he could find answers in the gleaming brass. Charles was pacing, his walking stick thudding against the Savonnerie carpet.
Her revelations to Charles in the inn parlor in Alfriston were a thing of the past. She felt the echoes sometimes when Charles’s gaze rested upon her, but their world had shrunk to the next few hours and the task of finding Helen Trevennen.
They had been waiting for Lady Frances for a nerve-scraping ten minutes. It was just past nine-thirty on Wednesday morning—more than twenty-four hours since Colin’s disappearance, less than four days until Carevalo’s Saturday-night deadline. If Lady Frances could not help them, searching for Helen Trevennen in Brighton would indeed be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Just when Mélanie was ready to run up to Lady Frances’s boudoir and drag her husband’s aunt downstairs, the door opened. Lady Frances swept into the room and surveyed them like a queen regarding a trio of upstarts who have invaded her audience chamber. As usual, she was dressed in shades of purple, in this case a morning dress of twilled lilac sarcenet that turned her eyes the same color. Her hair—which had only turned a brighter gold with the years—had been hastily dressed, but she wore a full suite of cameo jewelry.
“What on earth are you doing here?” she said in the low silk-velvet voice that could command the attention of every drawing room in London (and, rumor had it, had whispered across the pillows of half the cabinet, two royal dukes, and possibly the Prince of Wales). “The only one in the family who’s up at such an ungodly hour is Chloe and she’s at the park with her governess.” Chloe was Lady Frances’s youngest child, a girl of ten. “I know London has become horridly modern, but I wasn’t aware that it was the custom to pay calls before noon there any more than it is here.”
Charles moved forward, leaning on his walking stick, took her hand, and kissed her cheek. “Our apologies, Godmama. We wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t very serious indeed.”
A smile broke across her angular features. “You haven’t called me ‘Godmama’ since you were at Harrow. You must want something.” She drew back and looked up at him. “Good God, Charles, what have you been doing to yourself? You look dreadful.” She touched his cheek, an uncharacteristically maternal gesture. “You’d better tell me about it. I’m having chocolate sent in, since I didn’t have a chance to finish my morning cup in my boudoir.”
She walked forward, the folds of her gown clinging to the long line of her legs. “Mélanie, you’re looking indecently beautiful as usual, despite the fact that you obviously haven’t had enough sleep in the last twenty-four hours. You must be careful, my dear, even a complexion like yours needs tending. Edgar, I’m glad to see you in company with your brother.” She sank down on a chair covered in cerulean blue satin, positioned so the light fell at a flattering angle across her face. “Now, tell me what’s happened.”
Charles returned to the settee. “It’s about Colin,” he said, and gave as concise an account of Colin’s disappearance as was possible.
Each time, Mélanie found it harder to sit still while the story was told. Each time, the precious minutes spent going over already familiar ground grated more on her strained nerves. She forced herself to watch her husband’s aunt as Charles spoke. Lady Frances’s shrewd eyes went wide. Her face paled, so that despite the angle of the light, lines stood out against her carefully tended skin. She did not interrupt with questions, though a footman came in with a chocolate pot in the midst of the story. Lady Frances poured with hands that were not quite steady. When Charles finished, she sat in silence for a long moment. The rich, sweet aroma of chocolate and the musky scent of her perfume drifted through the air. Frances Dacre-Hammond had been privy to half the political secrets in London and had broken up more than one marriage, but Mélanie had never seen her so completely shocked.
“Good God.” Lady Frances put her hand to her throat, fingering her necklace. The sunlight flickered over the carved alabaster of the cameos. “I met that man Carevalo. He came to Brighton on a visit two years ago. Emily Cowper introduced us. At a card party at the Assembly Rooms. He seemed—”
“Crude. Charming.” A chill rang along Mélanie’s skin at the memory of that charm, exercised on her herself so recently. “Amusing. Harmless.” Her lips curled over the last word. She opened her reticule and took out the picture she’d drawn of Helen Trevennen. “Do you recognize this woman?”
Lady Frances held the sketch out at arm’s length, frowned, and at last reached into the pocket of her skirt for a pair of gilt-rimmed spectacles. She hooked the delicate wires over her ears. Her penciled brows drew into an unaccustomed frown. “There’s something familiar about the face, though I can’t quite place her. No, let me think.” She held up a hand before any of them could voice their disappointment.
Charles sat perfectly still, one white-knuckled hand gripping the Grecian arm of the settee. “Someone you’ve seen here? Recently?”
“No, not recently. But I think it was here.”
Mélanie wound the strap of her reticule through her shaking fingers. “Could you have seen her on the stage?”
“No. It was a social occasion, I’m sure of it. She was a lady. At least she lived like a lady, which is all any of us can say.” Lady Frances lifted her cup and took a sip of chocolate, her gaze still on the picture. Mélanie swallowed a scream of frustration and suppressed the impulse to dash her own chocolate cup against the Chinese wallpaper.
“Thanks to the prince, the world flocks to Brighton these days,” Lady Frances continued. “One sees people at the shops and the lending library and the Promenade without ever actually being introduced.”
“Perhaps she altered her appearance when she came here.” The steel links of the strap cut against Mélanie’s hands. “Her hair or—”
“That’s it.” Lady Frances snapped her fingers. “Her hair was quite dark, even darker than yours, Mélanie. Very dramatic and well done—you couldn’t tell it was dye. Not someone who moved in my set, but I must have seen her a handful of times.”
Charles leaned forward. “Where?”
“Not the Old Ship or the Castle Inn or the Assembly Rooms. Somewhere outdoors. The Promenade? That doesn’t quite seem right.”
“She was fond of horse races,” Charles said.
Lady Frances tapped her fingers against the picture. “Of course, the races. Excellent taste in clothes, dressed with propriety but never looked dowdy.”
“What was her name?” Charles asked.
“I haven’t the least idea, I’m afraid. I don’t believe we were ever fo
rmally introduced.”
Disappointment robbed Mélanie of speech for a moment. It was Charles who spoke. “When did you last see her?”
Lady Frances frowned and took another sip of chocolate. “The years have a way of running together. I do remember catching a glimpse of her when your cousin Cedric and Maria were paying their annual visit. One of the children was a baby. Ronald? No, I think it was Algernon, so that would make it four years ago. Cedric kept turning his field glasses her way. It was more life than I’d seen in him since he was a boy.”
“She’s not in Brighton anymore?” Charles said.
“I couldn’t swear to having seen her since that time with Cedric and I know I haven’t in the last year or two. People are always coming and going at Brighton.”
She got to her feet with a decisive sweep of her skirts. “I fear I can tell you no more, but I believe I know someone who can. Give me ten minutes to make myself presentable.” She swept from the room without waiting for an answer.
“Good God.” Edgar broke the silence in a soft, low voice. “Miss Trevennen actually was here.”
Mélanie unwound the strap of her reticule from her chafed hand and spread her sketch of Helen Trevennen out on the marquetry table beside the settee. “It sounds as though she lived in a rather different style here than she had in London.” She took a pencil from her reticule and darkened Helen’s hair.
Charles righted his chocolate cup, which was tilting toward the carpet. “The blackmail theory seems more and more likely.”
Mélanie lifted her pencil and studied the drawing. “We may actually—”
“Yes.” Charles was staring at a Turner seascape on the wall opposite. His voice shook with suppressed hope. “I know.”
In two minutes less than the promised ten—Mélanie tracked the time on the Staffordshire mantel clock—Lady Frances returned to the room, swathed in a violet pelisse trimmed in sable, a violet satin bonnet adorned with ostrich feathers, and an enormous sable muff and tippet. Her crested amethyst barouche awaited them in the street below.
She didn’t speak until they were settled in the silk damask interior. “Billy Hopkins,” she said, twitching her skirt smooth. “Runs Lord Hodge’s racing stable just outside of town. He knows all the comings and goings of the racing set. If anyone remembers this Helen Trevennen or whatever she was calling herself here, he will.”
“You know him well?” Charles asked.
A smile played about her lips. “Well enough. I am confident he can be trusted.”
Mélanie gripped the carriage strap to steady her nerves as much as her person. “Good. We can’t afford any mistakes.”
Lady Frances put a lilac-kid-gloved hand over Mélanie’s own. “I know what you must be feeling, my dear. I confess I grow quite alarmed when Chloe catches a simple chill, and I worry over the older children far more than I’d ever admit to them. Even Cedric. He may grate on my nerves after a three-day visit, but he is still my son.”
Mélanie looked beneath the ruched gauze brim of Lady Frances’s bonnet and saw genuine sympathy in the cool eyes. “One’s children always are,” she said.
“Quite.” Lady Frances nodded, then glanced across the carriage at Charles and Edgar. “It’s a mystery to me how my sister managed to raise the pair of you, while I produced Cedric. He’s entirely too like his father. That’s what I get for giving my husband a legitimate heir.”
Edgar flushed. “Aunt Frances—”
“Don’t you turn into a prude too, boy. Anyone who knew Dacre-Hammond would be relieved to claim just about anyone else as a sire.”
Mélanie met Charles’s gaze without meaning to. His expression gave nothing away, but surely he could not help but think of Colin, who was his son in every way but the biological. And of his own father, who might not be his father at all. Mélanie wondered, not for the first time, if Lady Frances knew the truth of Charles’s parentage. She knew Charles would never be brought to ask his aunt.
Lady Frances settled her muff and reticule on the seat beside her. “A sense of humor is an invaluable asset. If your mother had been able to laugh at the world more she’d have had an easier time of it.”
“Very true.” Charles’s voice was cool and level. “She took everything intensely.”
“She was the cleverest child.” Lady Frances traced a pattern in the mist-filmed window glass. “She could run rings about me when we did lessons—when she hadn’t taken to her bed with one of her fits of the blue devils. Too much brains to know what to do with. Marrying your father was about the worst thing she could have done with herself. You must have realized that by now, you always were intelligent boys.”
“It had occurred to me,” Charles said.
Lady Frances studied them. “She’d be pleased to see the two of you working together. Do I gather that this unfortunate business has made you friends again?”
Edgar, who had been staring at his hands, looked up at her, robbed of speech.
“Aunt Frances,” Charles said in a tightly clenched voice, “this is hardly the time—”
“On the contrary. We have another quarter hour before we get to the stables and silence will drive us all mad. I’ve been waiting for the right time since your mother died. If it hasn’t come in the past thirteen years, I have no faith in it coming in the next.”
“There are some matters,” Charles said, “about which there is nothing to say.”
“Perhaps.” Lady Frances tucked a strand of gold hair beneath her bonnet. “This isn’t one of them. I know Elizabeth wasn’t the best of mothers—she was rather poorer at it than I am, and God knows I’m no prize—but she was always very proud of how close her two sons were.”
“No doubt.” Charles sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “It eased her conscience for not being close to us herself.”
Edgar shot him a glance. “It’s true,” Charles said.
Lady Frances surveyed them like a governess searching for the right way to drive home the point of a lesson. “It’s never easy to lose a parent, and it must have been particularly beastly for you to lose her as you did. But it’s foolish and self-indulgent to let it govern your lives over a decade later. It isn’t as though you saw her that much when she was alive, after all.”
“Very true,” Charles said.
Lady Frances was treading on ground that Mélanie had not dared explore in seven years of marriage. Mélanie studied her husband. His face was closed, but the tension about his mouth was one step short of an explosion.
“And it’s sheer folly,” Lady Frances continued, “to let Elizabeth’s death interfere with what you have between you.”
“Who says it did?” Edgar demanded.
“No one,” said their aunt. “But I can’t think what else went wrong between the pair of you. And it’s plain something did.”
Charles said nothing, a trick of his when he couldn’t think of an appropriate retort.
Edgar rose to the bait. “Who says it’s plain?”
Lady Frances lifted her brows. “Anyone with eyes in her head, boy.” She gripped the strap as they rounded a corner. “At the risk of sounding appallingly sentimental, surely if a crisis such as this teaches us anything, it is that we cannot afford to waste time on petty quarrels.”
Charles smiled into her eyes with a sweetness that was as deadly as absinthe. “Or on idle speculation.”
That silenced even Lady Frances. But she had forced the Fraser brothers into presenting a more unified front than Mélanie had seen in seven years.
Which, Mélanie thought, might have been Lady Frances’s intention from the first.
Chapter 25
M élanie caught the smell of horses as she descended the carriage steps to a brick-paved yard. A thick mist eddied in the breeze, like a muslin undercurtain, affording glimpses of low gray-stone buildings, slate roofs, leaded-glass windows.
A ferocious bark sounded. A streak of black and white came hurtling out of the mist, resolved itself into a border collie, and put
its muddy paws up on Lady Frances’s pelisse.
“Down, Jasper.” Lady Frances patted the dog’s head. The dog subsided, danced round her in a circle, and went over to sniff Charles’s boots.
A towheaded young man of about twenty followed the border collie through the mist. “Your ladyship. I didn’t realize you were coming to the stables today. Is Mr. Hopkins expecting you?”
“Hullo, Giles.” Lady Frances gave him the same smile she would give to a young diplomat in her drawing room. “No, this is an unexpected visit. Is Mr. Hopkins in?”
“Out on a training gallop, but he should be back any minute now.”
As if on cue, the thud of horses’ hooves on damp ground echoed through the mist. Two men galloped into the yard, sending up a spray of muddy water.
“Fanny.” A lean, bearded man with silvery hair swung down off a sleek chestnut mare. A piercing smile crossed his face. Then he took in the others standing round her. His shoulders straightened, as though he had shrugged into a formal coat instead of his tweed riding jacket. “Lady Frances.”
“Hullo, Billy.” Lady Frances gave him an answering smile that spoke volumes about their intimacy, then introduced her nephews and Mélanie. “We’re in rather desperate need of information.”
Billy Hopkins’s bushy steel-gray brows rose, but he asked no questions, an action that went a long way toward winning Mélanie’s heart. “Best come in out of the damp, then.” He patted the chestnut mare’s neck and glanced up at the dark-haired young man who rode the other horse. “See them stabled and then take out Lightning. But be sure to lock Jasper up first.
“New horse,” he explained as he led them across the mud and straw of the yard. “Magnificent animal, speed like I’ve never seen. But he must have had a bad experience with a dog. He goes berserk round poor Jasper. Danger to himself, and not exactly safe for anyone else who happens to be in the area.”
He opened a door onto a stone-floored kitchen with gleaming copper pans on the wall and the smell of bacon and coffee lingering in the air. He waved them to seats at the long deal table, tossed his damp coat over a chair back, and went to the range. “Something to drive out the chill.” He lifted the lid from an iron pot, releasing the pungent, winey scent of spiced cider. “Have to admit I feel the damp more than I used to.”