Secrets of a Lady (aka Daughter of the Game)

For a moment, Charles forgot to breathe. “Did Miss Trevennen say anything about the keepsake?”

Miss Goddard shook her head. “She pulled the pages of the letter over it. I don’t think she realized I’d seen. I don’t think she wanted me to see. Helen was free enough with other people’s property, but she was jealous of her own.”

“Did she say anything else?” Charles kept his voice even, stripped of all but essentials.

“No, just that she’d be ready in a minute. I fetched my gloves and she met me in the corridor. When I tried to offer my condolences on her loss, she laughed it off and said no man was worth crying over. We went to the tavern and had the conversation I told you about. It was the last time I saw her.”

“Did you mention any of this to Iago Lorano?” Charles said. “Did you tell him about her uncle in the Marshalsea?”

“No.” Miss Goddard smoothed the fabric of her shawl, a gesture that seemed uncharacteristically nervous. “I didn’t particularly trust his story—if he was someone who’d known Helen in the past, he might have had something to do with why she ran away.” The ironic look crossed her face again. “Besides, he didn’t threaten to use his influence against the theater.”

Charles got to his feet. “Believe me, Miss Goddard, I wouldn’t have resorted to such despicable tactics had I seen an alternative.”

Miss Goddard gave him one of her incandescent smiles. “Do you know, I have the oddest inclination to believe you, Mr. Fraser. You’re either a very honest man or an exceedingly good actor.”

When they returned to the stage, the foils were still clanging. “‘Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will you walk?’” said one of the actors, sounding more natural now.

“Thank God,” Miss Goddard murmured. “Perhaps we’ll actually get to one of my scenes before the midday break.”

Ned Thurgood emerged from the wings, a jeweled flask in one hand, a feathered mask in the other.

“Miss Goddard was a great help,” Charles said. “We appreciate her cooperation. And yours.”

Thurgood nodded, one eye on the duelists. “I’m glad to hear it. I wish you well in your search.”

Miss Goddard stared at the mask. “Please tell me that isn’t for me.”

“For the ball scene.”

“Neddie. Dearest. Chicken feathers make me sneeze.”

“Well, at least—”

Charles and Mélanie left them to argue it out and made their way out of the theater in silence. Charles turned toward the corner where Randall was waiting with the carriage. The full reality of what they had learned washed over him. He stopped and gripped a lamppost with one hand. “God,” he said, his forehead against the iron of the lamppost, his voice so wracked with relief it trembled. “Sweet Jesus.”

Mélanie laid a hand on his arm. Her fingers were shaking. “I know. I didn’t really believe Helen Trevennen had the ring until now.”

Charles released the lamppost. “She may have sold it. Do you have any paper?”

She dropped her hand and took a notebook and pencil from her reticule.

Charles propped the notebook against the iron lamppost and scribbled a brief note as he spoke. “I’ll have Addison start making inquiries among London jewelers while we visit Helen Trevennen’s uncle at the Marshalsea.”

“Mr. Trevennen told Miss Goddard he didn’t have any idea where Helen had gone.”

“But he must know something about her friends or at the very least her family. At present he’s our only lead.”

They returned to the carriage, and Charles gave Randall the note. “This is for Addison. Stop back at the Thistle and ask Baxter to have someone he trusts deliver it to Berkeley Square. Then take us to the Marshalsea.”

“Right you are.” Randall pocketed the note and accepted the direction to the debtors’ prison as matter-of-factly as if Charles had asked to be driven to Parliament or his club in St. James’s.

When they were settled in the carriage, Mélanie looked at Charles as though about to ask something, then clamped her lips shut.

Charles pulled his watch from his pocket and snapped it open. The fitful sunlight fell on the inscription inside the cover.

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite. M.

The familiar engraved words slashed like a sword cut. “It’s twenty-five minutes past eleven,” he said. “Colin’s been missing for at least eight hours.”

She nodded without looking at him. “Thank you.” Her voice was parched.

He returned the watch to his pocket. “Blanca can help Addison with the jewelers. Between the two of them they can cover a lot of territory.” At the mention of his wife’s maid, a hitherto unconsidered thought occurred to him. “Oh, Christ. I suppose Blanca was a French agent, too?”

“No, Blanca was my maid. I was a French agent.”

“And Blanca knew it.”

“Charles, you know as well as anyone it’s impossible to keep secrets from one’s maid or valet.”

“But disgustingly easy, apparently, to keep them from one’s husband. I think Addison may be in love with Blanca.”

“Of course he is. He’s been in love with her since they met, though they only actually became lovers in the last couple of years—Addison kept worrying she was too young or he was compromising her virtue. I have no doubt Blanca loves him just as much. And, believe me, I didn’t put her up to it.”

Her words grated on his nerves like nails on a schoolroom slate. “Believing you does not come easily at present, madam.”

She turned her head to look him full in the face. “Blanca was a fourteen-year-old orphan when I met her, Charles. Raoul and I rescued her from her uncle’s filthy tavern where she had to fight off her uncle’s blows and the wandering hands of the customers. She would have done anything for me after we took her away from there. Lay the blame for the deception where it belongs. At my door.”

“Damn you, there’s blame enough to go round.” Nausea gripped him for a moment, like a vise. He looked at his wife. She was as familiar to him as the salt breeze off the Perthshire coast or the smell of snuff and the crack of walnuts from the back benches in the House of Commons. And at the same time, she was as much a stranger as Helen Trevennen. “How old were you?”

“How old was I when?”

“When you went to work for O’Roarke.” He ran his fingers through his hair. He had laid himself open to her in an intimate detail it seared him to remember, yet he did not know even the simplest facts of her life. “Christ, how old are you now?”

“Six-and-twenty. My birthday is the sixth of October. Raoul taught me it’s best to stick to the truth when you can.”

O’Roarke’s name was like salt poured on a raw wound. He wanted to hurt her with a savageness he could scarcely recognize in himself. “I’m surprised you can even remember the truth. Am I supposed to feel less a fool because I’ve been presenting you with jewel boxes on the correct date every year? How old were you when O’Roarke found you?”

“Sixteen.”

“A year after your father died.”

“Yes.”

Charles looked at her for a moment. He’d been constructing defenses for too long not to recognize them in others. Mélanie would answer questions about working in a brothel, about being a spy and betraying her marriage vows, but she shied away from any mention of her father’s death.

He wanted to batter her defenses and force her to confront whatever she was hiding from, because that might inflict on her some fraction of the pain she’d inflicted on him. He wanted to ask more about her father, because with the part of his brain that could still think at all, he wanted to understand her.

But he said nothing. Perhaps he did not press her out of his old habit of not pushing past the boundaries she set. Or perhaps his childhood hurts were still too raw for him to force her to speak of her own, whatever else she had done.

They pulled up in front of the Thistle, and Randall ran into the tavern to deliver Charles’s message. Mélanie turned her face to the window. “Charles, what do you think was in the letter from Lieutenant Jennings? Jennings wouldn’t have known he was going to die when he wrote it. He wasn’t planning to send the ring with it. He was probably just using the letter as a temporary hiding place until he gave the ring to the bandits to sell to you.”

Charles stared at the bland emptiness of the carriage seat opposite. “Romantic drivel. Erotic imaginings. He could even have written to her about his swindle with the ring, though I doubt he’d have been stupid enough to put it down in writing. And if Miss Trevennen knew what the ring was, she’d have been a fool not to try to sell it to the British government.”

“So what was she afraid of? Was Jennings protecting her from something, so that once he was gone she had to run?”

“Jennings didn’t strike me as much of a protector.” Charles folded his arms across his chest. “She could have been lying about being afraid. I get the feeling Miss Trevennen lied with great agility.”

“Yes.” Mélanie put the grimy fingertips of her gloves up to her temples. “Considering how like me she seems to have been, one would think I’d understand her better.”

Charles shot a quick look at her. She sounded serious, not self-mocking, and her dark brows were drawn in concentration. “Perhaps she was running off with a wealthy lover,” he said. “That would explain why she told Violet Goddard she’d made her fortune and her life had changed.”

“Jennings’s death freed her to go off with this other man? That assumes she took her loyalty to Jennings seriously.”

“Some women do,” Charles said.

Mélanie jerked as though he’d struck her. “Very true,” she said. “But that doesn’t explain the secrecy surrounding her disappearance.”

Charles scanned her face, looking for something he couldn’t have defined and wouldn’t have believed if he’d found it. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t.”

Randall swung back onto the box and gave the horses their office. Mélanie fell silent as they wended their way through the London streets. They often sat thus, on their way to a rout or a reception or an evening at the theater or on an expedition to buy books for the children or attend a public meeting or see the latest Royal Academy Exhibition at Somerset House. Her profile looked as it always did, outlined against the green silk that covered the carriage walls. He would have recognized the angle of her head in the shadows of twilight. He would have known the elusive scent of her skin in cloaking darkness. How could her outward person be the same, when everything about her was false? How, through seven years of marriage, could he have been such an utter fool as never to have guessed the truth of what she was? He had an unexpected memory of one of the rare, perfect days he had spent with his mother. He must have been about ten, because it was before his sister was born. His mother had taken him and his brother riding along the Perthshire coast, and they’d picnicked on the beach. While his brother built a sand castle, his mother had pulled out a notebook and taught Charles the key to an ingenious cipher. That night she’d eaten supper with them in the nursery and tucked them into bed. He could still remember her promising them another such day tomorrow as he drifted off to sleep. But when they woke in the morning, she’d already packed her bags and left for London. They hadn’t seen her again for three months.

He’d long since accepted that he hadn’t known his mother. He would never know what had finally driven her to take her life, if she had thought of her children in those last moments or if he and his brother and sister had been as tangential to her then as they had the rest of the time.

He certainly hadn’t known his father. He would never know if Kenneth Fraser had accepted him as his heir out of duty or uncertainty. He would never know who actually had fathered him, in the crudest sense of the word.

He thought, with the stab of guilt her memory always brought, of his first love, Kitty. God knows he hadn’t understood her or he wouldn’t have failed her so badly. It was too late now to understand his parents or Kitty. In recent years, he had begun to realize that he might never know what had gone wrong between him and his brother, either.

But he would have sworn he knew Mélanie to the core.

The sharp smell of the river seeped into the carriage. Mélanie broke the silence as they rattled across the dilapidated stones of London Bridge toward Southwark. Her voice was unusually husky. “Will we have trouble getting into the Marshalsea?”

Charles tore his gaze from the broad, greasy expanse of the Thames, thick with barges and lighters and skiffs. “They lock the gates at night, but there’s no trouble getting in during the day. My classics tutor at Oxford spent a year there. He was a brilliant man with a weakness for cards and not a lot of skill to go with it. I visited him in prison several times.”

“I remember. You told me about him when you proposed the bill to change the debt laws.”

Another image flickered across his memory. Sitting at his desk in the early hours of the morning with a dull pain in his head and a scribbled-over paper before him. Mélanie bringing him coffee, perching on the edge of his desk, reading the speech, suggesting changes…

He stared at her. Betrayal wasn’t a single blow, but a series of sword cuts, each one uniquely painful. “You helped me with that speech. Not to mention God knows how many others. I let a foreign agent pen the words I spoke in the House of Commons. I suppose that ought to be funny. I suppose you thought it was funny.”

She turned to him with a sharp twist of her head. “Charles, whatever else you think of me, you must realize I believe in the same things you do. The freedom to speak and write what one believes. A legal system that doesn’t throw people in prison without charge. A life in which children don’t starve on the streets or die in workhouses or lose their limbs in factories. A say in one’s own government.”

“Liberty, equality, and fraternity?”

“In a nutshell.”

“Your Napoleon Bonaparte changed the French republic into an empire long before he lost at Waterloo.”

“I’d be the last to call Napoleon a saint or even a hero,” Mélanie said. “Perhaps he betrayed the revolution and trampled on its ideals. Perhaps we all did. But I’d take what Napoleon did for France and Spain over what’s come after any day.”

“And that justifies everything you did?”

“What do you want me to say? That my belief in a tarnished ideal gave me the right to lie to you and betray you at every turn? That I see now that I was wrong, that I should have fought fairly when we both know war isn’t fair? That I turned my back on everything I believed in the moment I realized I loved you? None of those answers would be true.”

“Least of all that you love me.” Anger welled up on his tongue like fresh blood. “There’ve been enough lies between us already, Mel.”

“‘Doubt truth to be a liar; But—’” She shook her head. “I don’t expect you to believe me. I wouldn’t believe it, were our situations reversed. But I do love you, Charles. I always will.”

He returned her gaze, barricading himself against the plea in her eyes. “God,” he said, sick with her, sick with himself for wanting to believe her, “you just don’t let up, do you?”