Secrets of a Lady

by Tracy Grant

  Charles put his fingers to the base of Giles’s neck, picked up his wrist, pressed his ear against the younger man’s chest. He looked up at Hopkins. “I’m afraid—”

  “My God.” Hopkins started, then stroked Lightning’s neck as the horse jerked. “He’s not—”

  “I can’t feel a pulse. Mel, do you have a mirror?”

  Mélanie scrambled to her feet without help from Edgar. She took a small silver-backed mirror from her reticule and went to kneel beside Charles. Giles’s face was peaceful but unnaturally still. His skin had the ruddy glow of a country boy. Beneath his tangle of white-blond hair, a hoofprint was imbedded in his smooth, young forehead, leaking blood round the edges. She held the mirror over his mouth, while Charles studied the glass. Despite the damp air it was clear, the clear, smooth emptiness of the absence of life.

  Charles looked at the others. “I’m sorry.”

  A stillness settled over the yard, as tangible as the shrieks and barking had been—violent death forcing its icy presence among the living. Mélanie had felt it in the mountains and valleys of Spain, in the streets of Léon, in their house in Brussels after Waterloo. But it did not belong there, in the tranquillity of the English countryside, in a world of strong animals and bustling activity and healthy young people.

  The silence was broken by a sharp cry from the girl in the apron. She turned her head away. The young man put his arm round her.

  “Jesus.” Fred dragged his gaze from the sprawled body and stared at Lightning. The horse was standing with his head lowered, almost as if he understood.

  Charles closed Giles’s eyes. “Don’t blame the horse. He was driven to it. If I’d been quicker on my own feet, the boy wouldn’t have had to get in the way.” He looked down at Giles. A muscle tightened along his jaw.

  Mélanie closed her hand round his arm.

  Lady Frances’s crisp voice cut across the yard. “There’s nothing to be gained from the lot of us standing out in the cold. Edgar, perhaps you could help Christopher carry Giles inside. Fred, Lightning should be stabled. Lottie, my dear, perhaps you could make us all some tea?”

  Her words jolted them back into the world of the living. A quarter hour later Giles had been laid out on the sitting room sofa beneath a blanket, Lightning was rubbed down and secure in his stall, and the company were gathered round the kitchen table, with steaming mugs in their hands, and a subdued Jasper lying on the stone floor. Mélanie stared at the corner of the table. Little more than an hour ago Giles had sat there swinging his booted foot against the table leg, tossing a russet apple in the air.

  Hopkins took a long draught from his mug, which contained something stronger than tea. “Who the hell let Jasper loose?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” Fred was slumped in his chair, chin tucked onto the sweat-soaked linen of his shirt, eyes glazed and vacant. “I shut him up safe in his pen before I took Lightning out. I checked the latch twice.”

  Lottie, the maid, tucked a cinnamon-colored curl beneath her cap. “The gate to his pen is ajar.” She sounded almost apologetic, as though by discovering it she had made it so. “I checked before I came in to make the tea.”

  Charles looked from Lottie to Christopher, the youngest of the stable lads. “Have you seen anyone about the stable today who doesn’t belong here?”

  Hopkins thunked his mug on the tabletop. “Good God. Surely you don’t think this was deliberate.”

  Charles met his gaze. “I’m not sure. It wouldn’t even occur to me if my wife and I hadn’t been the victims of so many accidents in the past twenty-four hours.”

  Christopher tugged off his tweed cap, as though he had only just realized he was still wearing it. “We got a grain delivery while you were touring the yard.”

  “An expected delivery?”

  “Oh, yes.” Christopher turned his cap in his hands. “But it wasn’t the usual deliveryman. He said the regular chap was home with a chill. I didn’t think twice about it, it’s happened before. But—”

  Charles flicked a glance at Mélanie.

  Mélanie pressed the fabric of her skirt over her lap. Her limbs felt not quite steady. She kept looking at Charles and imagining Lightning’s hoof imprinted on his forehead. Despite the injuries they had both suffered in the past twenty-four hours, this was the first time death had intruded with full force. “I suppose it’s possible we were followed here,” she said. “But even if we were, it would have been very chancy.”

  “Did you talk to this deliveryman?” Charles asked Christopher. “Did you say anything about Lightning?”

  Christopher fingered the brim of the cap. “Not about Lightning by name. But he did ask why the dog was penned up—Jasper was lying there with his best woebegone look—and I said one of the horses that was out now went berserk round the dog.” The full realization of what his words might have meant registered in the young man’s dark eyes.

  Charles clapped him on the shoulder. “You couldn’t have known, lad. When did this man leave?”

  “Twenty minutes or so ago.”

  Charles shifted his gaze to Hopkins. “What would Jasper do if he was let out of the pen? Would he run out into the yard immediately?”

  “What?” Hopkins ran a hand over his hair. “Oh, I see what you’re driving at. No, not necessarily. He might have sniffed round until he heard the horse’s hooves. Jasper loves the horses. Whenever there’s anything doing he wants to be in the middle of it. He—” Hopkins put a hand over his eyes. “My God, I can’t believe it’s happened.”

  Lady Frances laid her hand over his own on the tabletop.

  Edgar took a sip from his mug. “So Jasper could have been let loose sometime before Fred came back with the horse and then came running into the yard when he heard Lightning. Hard to see how this deliveryman could have counted on it all working, though.”

  Fred looked up as though struck by a sudden thought. “I’m sorry—perhaps it’s none of my business—but why the devil would anyone want to hurt any of you, even assuming they could count on the ploy working?”

  “No, actually it is your business.” Charles sat forward in his chair. “We were waiting to talk to you when the tragedy occurred.” Once again, he gave a brief outline of the story of Colin’s disappearance.

  Lottie gasped, and Christopher’s eyes went wide. Fred shook his head, as though he was beyond shock. He stared at the sketch Mélanie held out to him. “Yes, that’s Mrs. Somersby.” His gaze drifted over the picture, the past intruding on the present horror. “Lovely, wasn’t she? We all—Giles was as taken with her as any of us.” He put his fist against his mouth. “Christ.”

  “I know,” Charles said. “Giles was a brave and generous lad, and he had no business being mixed up in any of this.”

  “Do you remember the man Mrs. Somersby married?” Mélanie asked. Such a simple question, on which so much rested.

  “Oh, yes.” Fred’s hands curled round his mug. He had the graceful fingers of a man used to giving the subtlest commands with the reins. “When a woman you admire marries, you notice the man she chooses, even if you haven’t a prayer with her yourself.”

  “London barrister, wasn’t he?” Christopher said.

  “Yes. Started with a C, I think. Constant? No, Constable, that was it. We used to joke about him being as poker-faced as a constable. I told her outright once she was throwing herself away on him. She laughed and told me she’d always wanted to go back to London and he’d bought her the most charming house in Bedford Place. She said she’d marry me if I could do as much.”

  A street. A house. A name. Mélanie saw the realization break over Charles’s face, like the sweat that signals the end of a fever. “Thank you.” He drew a long breath. Beneath the table she could see his hands trembling. “Thank you very much.”

  Charles stared at the oil painting that hung on the wall of his aunt’s library, between bookcases filled with French novels, parliamentary registers, and just about every volume of erotic poetry written from ancient times to the
present.

  The painting, in the soft, sensuous style of Sir Joshua Reynolds, showed two girls sitting on a blue blanket beneath the glistening leaves of a copper beach, a picnic basket beside them. Both girls had fair hair dressed in a profusion of loose curls. Both wore white frocks in the full-skirted, tight-waisted fashion that had been in vogue thirty-five years ago, one sashed in blue, the other in purple.

  The girl with the purple sash had bright, buttery hair and the angular features, sharp eyes, and sardonic mouth that were characteristic of Lady Frances today. The girl in the blue sash was paler, her features more delicate. She might have been merely pretty in an insipid sort of way, were it not for the restless fever that burned in her eyes. As though she had a great thirst for life and knew, even at sixteen, that it could never be satisfied.

  “She was ill, you know,” Charles said.

  “Who?” Edgar’s voice came from the sofa behind him. They were alone in the room. Mélanie had gone upstairs to change her gown before their return to London.

  “Mama. Mother.” Beneath the smells of ink and leather and beeswax, Charles almost fancied he could catch a hint of jasmine. A teasing scent that always made him tense with wariness. In Lady Elizabeth Fraser’s presence one had had to be braced for anything. “Aunt Frances was right. Mother had a brilliant mind and she didn’t know what to do with it—much like Kitty. But it went beyond that. The black moods that confined her to bed for weeks on end. The reckless giddiness that had her staying up all hours and running crazy risks and flitting from one man’s bed to another—”

  Edgar looked up from a contemplation of the carpet. “For God’s sake, Charles.” A pulse pounded beneath the pale skin of his jaw. “You’re saying Mother’s—indiscretions—were an illness?”

  “Not exactly.” Charles walked to a Queen Anne chair by the fireplace. The fresh bandage Mélanie had put on his leg felt stiff against his skin. “Aunt Frances told me once that when Mother was in one of her frenetic states she’d be convinced anything was possible. And then the depression would set in and she’d think that nothing was.” He stood behind the chair and rested his arms on its high back. “I didn’t understand until I saw the same symptoms in a friend in my college at Oxford. He wrote poetry. Quite good poetry, I thought. At times he’d stay up writing through the night convinced he was producing a work of genius. And then for a fortnight he’d scarcely leave his bed.”

  Edgar turned his gaze toward the fire. “I don’t see what this—”

  “I talked about it with Geoffrey Blackwell. He has an interest in illnesses of the brain.” Charles looked his brother full in the face. “Geoffrey says there are a number of people who show symptoms similar to those of Mother and my friend at Oxford. He thinks it’s something organic that goes on in the mind. She was probably born with it.”

  Edgar looked back at him, his eyes wary. “And if she was?”

  “We’ll never understand the demons she battled. We’ll never understand what finally pushed her over the edge. But it isn’t your fault she put that gun to her temple.”

  Edgar pushed himself to his feet. “Who says I think it is?”

  “You do, brother. By your very silence.”

  Edgar moved to the table where the coffee and cold collation Lady Frances had insisted on serving were laid out. “You’re being unusually melodramatic, Charles.” His voice had the bite of sleety air. “I admit being there when Mother killed herself was particularly unpleasant. I admit to thinking I should have been able to stop it, especially in those first hellish days. Later I realized no one could control Mother when she set her mind to something. It hasn’t warped my life, I assure you.”

  “It’s warped your relations with me.”

  “Has it?” Edgar poured a cup of coffee, picked up a fork, and stared down at the plate of cold beef and sliced Double Gloucester. “Perhaps I haven’t the imagination to see it properly, but I think you and Aunt Frances exaggerate. We’ve grown apart as we grew older. It happens to most siblings. We get on better than a score of brothers I could name.”

  “Oh, yes, we ride together, we play catch with Colin and Jessica, you and Lydia dine with Mélanie and me. But when was the last time the two of us had a talk that was more than superficial?”

  Edgar speared a piece of beef. “You like chess, I like roulette. You loved Oxford, I couldn’t wait to be gone from the place. You have a perfect marriage, I—made rather a mull of mine.” He added three pieces of cheese to the plate and picked up a jar of chutney. “I’m a soldier in the British army. Half the time you don’t even seem to be sure what country you belong to.”

  The last was like a fist to the face in the midst of a fencing match. “What?” Charles said.

  Edgar frowned down at the plate of food he’d assembled, then lifted his gaze to Charles. “I know Carevalo’s blackmailing you to find the ring, but you’d go against British policy in Spain in a heartbeat, don’t deny it.”

  “I won’t.” Charles fell back on the even voice he’d use to answer such questions in the House of Commons. “Just because I disagree with our current government’s foreign policy doesn’t make me less British. We live in a parliamentary system, or had you forgotten?”

  Edgar fixed him with a gaze as hot and hard as the coals burning in the fireplace. “Only last month you said you thought France might be better off today if we hadn’t won at Waterloo.”

  Charles pushed his fingers through his hair. “Did I? When?”

  “One night at Brooks’s when you’d drunk enough whisky that it even went to your head.”

  “Well, I don’t deny I’ve thought it.” On more than one occasion. But the words had a strange resonance now that he knew his wife had been working to bring about just that outcome.

  “My God, Charles, our whole way of life was at stake.”

  “I seriously doubt that. Though it might have been a very good thing if it had been.”

  “Men fought and died—”

  Charles looked at his brother and found himself answering as he knew Mélanie would have done. “Men fought and died on both sides, Edgar.”

  Edgar shook his head. “I can’t even begin to understand how you could think that way. But that’s the difference between us.” He turned from the table without touching the food and paced the carpet, hands clasped behind his back. “You like pulling ideas apart and twisting them and looking at them upside down. I can’t imagine anything more uncomfortable. I like to know where I stand. I need to know where I stand.”

  “And if it turns out you’re standing in a mire?”

  “You see?” Edgar whirled round and faced him down the book-lined length of the library. “That’s exactly what I mean. Sometimes I’m not sure you’d admit there’s such a thing as good and evil.”

  “I’m not sure I would.”

  “Even after what’s happened to Colin?”

  Fear squeezed Charles’s chest, but he held his gaze steady. “Even then.”

  Dust motes danced in the gray light between them. “Do you even believe in God?” Edgar demanded.

  “Not even before I witnessed war firsthand.”

  Something flared in Edgar’s clear blue eyes. One might have called it a sense of betrayal. “Damn it, Charles, do you believe in anything at all?”

  “Humanity,” Charles said after a moment. “Though I must confess to being disappointed more often than I would care to admit.”

  Edgar shook his head and turned away. Charles realized how far they had moved from the original conversation. Belatedly, he recognized Edgar’s gambit as the smokescreen it was. “You’re better at this than I credited, brother.”

  Edgar walked back to the table and picked up his coffee. “Better at what?”

  “Diverting the conversation.” Charles spread his fingers on the blue velvet of the chair back. “Mélanie thinks you were in love with Kitty.”

  Edgar laughed, but the five-second pause before he spoke told volumes. “Women, even Mélanie, like to romanticize things.”


  “I’m sorry,” Charles said. “I didn’t realize.”

  Edgar stared at him. “Hell, Charles, don’t you ever miss anything?”

  “In this case I was singularly blind. It was Mélanie who noticed and even then I wasn’t sure.” He hesitated, searching for the right words. “It can’t have been easy learning I was her lover. I’m sorry.”

  “Most men were a little in love with Kitty Ashford. Truth to tell, I didn’t have the faintest idea you’d been more than a friend to her until the gossip after her death.” Edgar’s mouth twisted. “She seemed to me to be the purest of women.”

  “I don’t excuse my own behavior, but you can hardly blame Kitty. Ashford had forfeited any right to fidelity.”

  “He was her husband.”

  “He was a rutting bastard who couldn’t keep his hands off the local women.”

  Edgar thunked the coffee cup back onto the table. “It wasn’t Kitty who changed things between us. It goes back far longer.”

  Charles fixed his gaze on the cream-and-gold patch of carpet in front of him. “When I got word of Mother’s death, I wanted nothing so much as to talk to you. By the time I got home the house was full of relatives and mourning rituals and there was no chance for private conversation. I got through it knowing that as soon as the house settled down for the night we could have one of our midnight conferences.”

  The late-night conferences in one or the other of their bedchambers had been a tradition from the time they left the nursery. They would sit talking half the night on the hearth rug, toasting slices of bread with the poker and warming pans of chocolate over the spirit lamp. “But when I knocked at your room, you didn’t answer. You’d bolted the door. We never had a midnight conference again.” Charles looked up at his brother. “You can’t tell me that was because you’d suddenly discovered we view the world through different lenses.”

  Edgar walked to the window that overlooked the back garden. He stared at the silvery trunk of a birch tree, though he seemed to be seeing beyond it. “Why does it matter to you so much?”