Fraser 03 - The Mask of Night

by Tracy Grant

  Ten years later

  Berkeley Square, London

  January 1820

  Mélanie Fraser crossed eight feet of Savonnèrie carpet and hesitated before the gleaming oak of the dressing room door. Despite the coals burning behind the satin-stitched firescreen and the tapers sparkling in their girandole candlesticks, the bedchamber felt cold. Or perhaps the cold came from anticipation of the evening ahead.

  She turned the handle and pushed the door open. The candlelight wavered, shifting over a tall figure in the act of fastening the cuffs of his black velvet doublet. The pier glass and the mirrored panels on the wardrobe doors reflected his image. She felt as though she had stumbled into one of her childrens’ picture books and was looking at some sort of fantastical creature of the night. A study in slashed black velvet and starched white linen, his face reduced to a full-lipped mouth and a shock of dark hair with a mask of jet beads covering the space in between.

  "I can't manage the clasp on my necklace," she said, "and I sent Blanca downstairs."

  He tugged off the mask, revealing sharp, Celtic cheekbones, deep set gray eyes, slanting dark brows. A collection of features as familiar to her as the parched slopes of the Cantabrian Mountains or the intricacies of a set of picklocks. But for a disconcerting moment she felt she was looking at a stranger. A stranger who happened to be her husband.

  Charles Malcolm Kenneth Fraser, the man to whom she was bound by circumstance, a yellowing set of marriage lines, and a tangle of emotions she could not begin to unravel crossed to her side and took the necklace from her fingers. He slid his hands beneath the curls her maid had so carefully arranged and fastened the gold links of the clasp. His hands closed round her throat for a moment as he set the cool pearls against her skin.

  "I never realized what an effective weapon a strand of pearls could make," he said.

  "Fatal lack of imagination, darling. And you're usually so inventive."

  "We all have our blind spots.” He pressed his lips to the nape of her neck. A shiver ran through her that had nothing to do with apprehension. Whatever had happened between them, some things never changed.

  "Thank you, dearest.” She turned round and summoned up a bright smile. "It's nice to have all the armor safely in place."

  He gave one of those unexpected schoolboy grins that always made her heart turn over. "Don't be pessimistic, Mel. For once, there's no reason to think we're going onto a battlefield."

  "That depends on how one defines a London ballroom.” Mélanie recalled her conversation over the teacups that afternoon with her friend Isobel Lydgate, the hostess of this evening’s masquerade ball. “Bel told me she didn't know what to be more worried about tonight—Whigs and Tories coming to blows over the Corn Laws or Russian and Austrian attachés quarreling about the Polish situation."

  "Or Bonapartists and Ultra Royalists debating the future of France?"

  "It seemed politic not to mention that."

  "Tactful as always, wife.”

  "Survival instinct."

  He lifted his cloak from a shield-back chair and watched her for a moment, with that look he'd so often worn in the last two months. As though she were a code he was searching for the key to.

  Her throat went tight. A betraying weakness. She turned, perhaps a little too quickly, and went back into the bedroom. Her cloak and mask and beaded reticule lay decorously on the striped green satin bench at the foot of the bed. She picked up the mask and found herself looking at the mahogany four-poster. In the shifting balance of power that was their marriage, it too had been a battlefield, more often than she cared to admit.

  Sometimes she could still not quite believe where her life had brought her. Ten years ago, she had been a young agent on her first mission, fired by Republican fervor. Seven years ago, in the course of a mission during the Peninsular War, she had met a British agent named Charles Fraser. Charles had believed her masquerade as a war refugee in need of protection. So well that to her own surprise, he had asked her to marry him. And she had accepted.

  A tactical marriage that positioned her perfectly to spy for the Bonapartist French. The sort of cool, ruthless decision a good spy makes. Only then she had made the fatal mistake that no agent could afford to make. She had fallen in love. Worse, she had fallen in love with her own husband, her enemy, a man whom she could never tell the truth of her identity. Even when the French were defeated at Waterloo and she stopped her work as a spy, she had known that if Charles ever learned the truth of her past their marriage would be over.

  And then two months ago, the unthinkable had happened. Their six-year-old son had been abducted, precipitating a chain of events that led to Charles learning she had been a Bonapartist spy. For a time, she’d been sure she’d never see him look at her with anything but hatred. But somehow they were still together. They had their son back and they were reconstructing their marriage. Lying in his arms in their darkened bedchamber, she could even believe their marriage might one day be stronger for the truth being in the open. She had far more than she had ever dared to hope for. And the devil of it was, every time Charles told her he loved her, she knew she didn’t deserve it.

  She draped the cloak over her arm, slipped her wrist through the silver strap on the reticule, and returned to the dressing room doorway. Her husband was settling his cloak over his shoulders with the ease of one used to disguises. "Charles—"

  "Yes?"

  She pressed her finger over a wrinkle in her glove. "Thank you."

  "For what?” He knotted the silk cords on his cloak.

  "If you have to ask, you aren't the man I take you for."

  "Which is entirely possible.” His gaze moved over face, her pearl-dressed hair, her black velvet Elizabethan gown. "We're only going to a ball given by two of our closest friends."

  "Did I say otherwise?"

  "I can read your silences rather well."

  She tucked a curl behind her ear. "It's nothing."

  "Surely you can lie better than that."

  "I'm afraid"—the words caught for a moment, because she wasn't used to admitting to being afraid of anything—"I'm afraid it's too early."

  "We can't hide forever.” He stretched out a hand and cupped her cheek.

  She leaned her cheek against his palm. Everything he risked by being married to her reverberated through her mind. If her past was exposed, at best he’d lose the political career he was so carefully building and the friendship of people he’d known since boyhood. At worst he’d be branded a traitor himself. “I’m an appallingly selfish woman,” she said.

  “Don’t talk twaddle, Mel.” He took her hand and laced his fingers through her own. “We’ll get through this.”

  Something prickled behind her eyelids that might have been tears. “You sound so very sure.”

  “Because we don’t have any other option. And because I know just how much I love you. And I think I know how much you love me.”

  “Love is a feeble shield in the face of politics,” she said, echoing something the Empress Josephine had once said to her. Not long before Napoleon Bonaparte divorced her.

  “Only if one has one’s priorities the wrong way round.” He lifted her hand and pressed his lips against her palm. “We’ve both made mistakes, sweetheart. We’ve both had complicated loyalties. But the fact that we’re together now matters far more than why we married in the first place.”

  She let herself lean into him for a moment, resting her head against the familiar warmth of his shoulder. “You’re very brave, darling, but I know just what you’re risking.”

  He touched her hair, lightly so as not to disarrange it. “I could walk away from it all tomorrow and be happy as long as I had you and the children.”

  “But I couldn’t bear to see you do it.” Her voice came out husky.

  “And with any luck you won’t have to.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Do you want to send our regrets and not go to the ball?"

  She drew back and summoned up one of the bri
ght smiles she’d worn like armor for years. "No, I was just indulging in a craven moment. We can’t fail Bel and Oliver.” Oliver and Isobel Lydgate were two of their closest friends, precisely the sort of friends she didn’t want Charles to lose because of her past. Oliver had gone to Oxford with Charles and they now sat in Parliament together. “Bel said she needed some friendly faces. There's a throng of new attachés and charges d'affaires on the guest list. I'm not going to recognize half of them."

  "I shouldn't worry.” Charles smiled into her eyes. “They'll all be wearing masks."

  Mélanie gathered up her skirt and moved to the door. "Oh, my darling. In this world, who doesn't?"

  The greasy water caught the reflection of the moonlight, like candlelight shimmering against grimy silk hangings at the end of a ball. Hortense Bonaparte gripped the boatman's hand and stepped onto the quayside. England. Land of fog and damp and tea and tenacity. The nation of shopkeepers that had defeated her stepfather at Trafalgar, had battled his forces for so long in Spain, had led the fight against him at Waterloo. The country more responsible than any other for his exile on a tiny bit of rock in the Atlantic. The country that had had such an influence on her life and the lives of her children and her husband and the man she loved. How odd that only now, of all times, she should set foot on English soil.

  She was cold for reasons that had nothing to do with the icicle damp that seeped through her fur-lined cloak. Her footing felt more precarious than it had on the boat. Perhaps it was easier for people who had been born to this life. Because her mother had married a man who made himself Emperor of France she was playing a game she did not understand, for stakes that terrified her, on a board that seemed to shift whenever she tried to grasp its outlines.

  Only a few years ago she had been the stepdaughter of the most powerful man in Europe, the mother of a hopeful young family, crowned Queen of Holland. Now her stepfather was exiled and her mother dead. She was banished from France, estranged from her husband, and separated from the man she loved. Protecting her children was all that mattered. And they bore the name of Bonaparte. A dangerous name to be cursed with in the world after Waterloo.

  Julien St. Juste detached himself from the shadows and moved toward her on the quayside. His eyes glinted a familiar blue beneath the curve of his beaver hat. A chill went through her at the same time her breath left her on a sigh of relief.

  "It's good to see you safely arrived, madame.” He took her gloved hand and bowed over it. "There were no difficulties?"

  She shook her head. "Your arrangements worked like clockwork. As usual."

  "But of course.” St. Juste smiled, the smile that must have once quickened her mother's pulse. A disturbing thought. One didn't like to think of one's mother in that way. And yet she was not entirely immune to that smile herself. "I'll see you to the lodgings I've found for you," he said. "It's not Malmaison or the Tuilleries, but I think you'll be quite comfortable. Then I'm afraid we'll have to go directly to St. James’s Place. I have your costume for the masquerade. Queen Elizabeth. It seemed appropriate."

  She looked up at him in the murky glow of the moonlight. "I'm not cut out for this. I'm not like my mother. Or Mélanie."

  "On the contrary. I’m confident you can be more than a match for Mélanie."

  "Mélanie is my friend."

  "Chère madame, friendship is a luxury we can't afford. Mélanie is the wife of a British politician. She’s in a very different position from ten years ago. As are we all.” St. Juste paused for a moment and looked down at her. "There's more of your mother in you than you know. It took a great deal of bravery to come this far."

  "I didn't have any choice." She made her voice cold and sharp, a trick she had copied from her mother, though for all she had once borne the title queen herself, she had never quite mastered Josephine's regal command.

  "There's always a choice."

  "You blackmailed me into helping you by threatening my children.” Her voice shook, rage overcoming fear. “You know if I’m caught in England and branded a spy, it will be the end of me. And my children will be left motherless.”

  St. Juste merely continued to smile that maddening smile. He offered her his arm. "I won't let you down. I'm quite certain we shall succeed."

  She kept her fingers steady on the soft wool of his greatcoat and permitted him to lead her down the quayside to the riverbank. She didn't doubt his words. That was precisely why she was cold with terror.

  Chapter 2

  I've decided to give a masquerade of all things. Oliver teases that I'm becoming shockingly fast. You must come with me to choose the silk for the ballroom hangings.

  Lady Isobel Lydgate to Mélanie Fraser

  10 December 1819

  Mélanie paused on the edge of the dance floor and stirred the candle-warmed air with her black silk fan. Ladies and gentlemen in costumes from all eras of history (and several that existed only in the imagination) crowded the red-and-gold brocade draped room. Yet the neat patterns of a country dance and the smell of ices from Gunter's, scent blended at Floris, and snuff from Friburg & Treyer betrayed that this was the world of London's beau monde.

  A world she had lived at the heart of for three years, balanced as precariously as if she perched on the edge of a gilded teacup. A world in which invitations to her entertainments were sought after, the style of her gowns and hair was copied, images of her face were displayed in printshop windows. A world in its own way as perilous as that of Bonaparte's court or the war-torn Peninsula. A world that would turn on her in an instant if they had the least idea of the truth of her past and her marriage to one of their own.

  Simon Tanner, her waltzing partner, procured two glasses of champagne from a passing footman and pressed one into her hand. “Excellent vintage,” he murmured, clinking his glass against hers. “Though mulled wine might have been more appropriate for a Twelfth Night masquerade.”

  Simon was costumed as Francois Villon in a tunic and boots. There was a red stain on his sleeve that Mélanie had thought for a moment was blood and then realized was red wine. A mishap or part of his costume? Probably the later. Simon, one of London's foremost playwrights, had a keen eye for detail and a knack for framing his arguments in such dazzlingly witty language that he shot his verbal darts straight past the eye of the censor.

  “I still haven’t figured out who half the people are,” Mélanie said, scanning the masked and costumed crowd. “I think that’s Caro Lamb as Cleopatra.”

  Simon nodded. “Her sister-in-law said she supposed we should be grateful she didn’t come as Salome minus six of the seven veils.” His gaze shifted among the dancers. "You'd think the Regent could have come up with something more imaginative than Henry VIII. I’m sure the Don Juan is Val Talbot, and I think the Greek goddess draping herself all over him is Lady Frances Webster. Who’s the Lancelot? Is it the Comte de Flahaut?"

  Mélanie nearly choked on her champagne. A shocking lapse, she was losing her edge. All she need do is make certain Simon had no notion of the circumstances of her past acquaintance with the Comte de Flahaut. She followed the direction of Simon’s gaze to a gentleman in a silver tunic and ornamental sword waltzing with a lady whose gothic ivory gown and jeweled tiara called to mind Guenevere.

  “Yes, I think it is Flahaut,” she said in a steady voice. “And the lady is his wife.”

  Simon studied the couple. “It’s an odd world we live in. At the time of Waterloo, I’d have never thought to see one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s aides-de-camp in the same ballroom as the Prince Regent.”

  Mélanie took a careful sip of champagne. ”I imagine a number of people would prefer not to see Flahaut here. Including his father-in-law.” Flahaut’s bride’s father, Admiral Keith, had escorted Napoleon Bonaparte to exile on St. Helena. He’d disowned his daughter for marrying Flahaut.

  “Because Flahaut fought for Napoleon Bonaparte?” Simons said. “Or—?”

  “Because he was Hortense Bonaparte’s lover?” Mélanie finished, for all
the world as though Hortense Bonaparte, now exiled from France, separated from her husband, and living with her two sons in Switzerland, was merely a name to be gossiped about. “Both I suspect.”

  Simon watched Flahaut shepherd his wife to a gilt chair. “Rumor had it Flahaut was quite devoted to Queen Hortense. I wonder what happened.”

  “Waterloo,” Mélanie said. “It changed everything.”

  A trio of girls in clinging medieval gowns brushed past, followed by a gentleman whose Trojan armor was given an anachronistic touch by the red enamel snuff box he was flicking open. Simon was besieged by two young girls who wanted to ask about his latest play.

  Mélanie moved toward the French windows in the hope that some cooler air would have leaked in round the glass. A hand closed on her arm. She turned and found herself looking into a pair of clear, bright blue eyes, behind a gilded half-mask. The rest of the woman's face was covered in white paint, bright lip and cheek rouge, dark brow blacking. A remarkably realistic imitation of Queen Elizabeth completed by a red wig, a crown that glittered with real diamonds, and a stiff cloth of gold gown.

  "I must speak to you, Mélanie."

  Mélanie’s fan tumbled from her fingers.

  "It's me.” The woman's fingers bit into her arm. "Please."

  Mélanie snatched up her fan, fingers stiff with shock, and led the way through the crowd to the French windows. Flambeaux and blood-red Japanese lanterns illumined the terrace, but it was empty in the cold bite of the January air. Mélanie cast a quick glance about, nodded at her companion, and went down the stone steps to the garden below. Sleety air cut through the velvet of her gown.

  Nothing moved in the shadows. By the light of the lanterns, Mélanie climbed the steps of the Temple of Diana that stood in the center of the garden. Far enough from the house to avoid being overheard, with a good view to afford warning should anyone else step onto the terrace.

  Inside the temple, Mélanie put her back to one of the marble pillars. Her companion turned to face her. Even in the shadows, the blue gaze was unmistakable, as was the soft, crimson-painted mouth beneath the mask.