Secrets of a Lady (aka Daughter of the Game)

Charles sprang down from the carriage in front of the Marshalsea prison and offered his hand to Mélanie. Chivalry or force of habit, he supposed. He released her as soon as she’d descended the carriage steps.

They were a world away from the decorous precincts of Mayfair or even the familiar chaos of Covent Garden. The air smelled of sour rot and the stench of refuse from the laystalls that overflowed the street. Windows were cracked or boarded over or missing entirely. Coal porters and dustmen, barefoot children, and men and women in shapeless, water-stained garments, who looked as though they scavenged on the river, pushed their way along the crowded street. Carriages clattered by, windows and doors securely locked.

The gray brick walls of the prison reared up before them, stolid, uncompromising, unrelenting. Charles surveyed the prison gates, shutting his mind to the fact that if Helen Trevennen’s uncle could give them no clue to her whereabouts, they might have reached a dead end.

As he and Mélanie crossed the pavement to the prison, a boy of no more than seven caught at the skirt of his greatcoat. Charles stared into the boy’s saucerlike eyes, thought of his son, and pressed some coins into the lad’s hand.

The sky had clouded over again, adding to the gloom of the place, but the porter who admitted them at the main gate was cheerful enough. He nodded at the mention of Mr. Trevennen, gave them a set of directions that sounded like the key to a maze, and said he was sure the old gentleman would be glad of company.

The Marshalsea was like a small, walled city. They made their way along grimy cobblestoned alleys, between high, smoke-stained brick buildings that might have passed for lodging houses if one forgot about the locked gates. A group of children were playing blindman’s buff in the wider space where two alleys intersected. A woman was taking her laundry down, one eye on the darkening sky. A terrier nosed round the garbage by the steps of one of the buildings. The sound of an ill-tuned spinet came through an open casement window, the hiss of a fire through another, voices raised in argument through a third.

Many people spent the better part of their lives here. You couldn’t get out of debtors’ prison until you paid off your debts and you couldn’t earn any money to pay off your debts while you were locked up. Yet another example of the profound wisdom of the British system of justice. The same system under which, until a mere five years ago, a parent could legally sell a child to be a climbing boy or a pickpocket or a prostitute. The only crime had been the sale not of the child but of the child’s clothes.

Trevennen’s rooms were on the first floor, through a decaying wooden archway, up a sagging staircase, down a long gallery that was open on one side. Charles knocked on the splintery door. Heavy, ponderous footsteps sounded within, and the door opened.

Pale blue eyes surveyed them out of a broad, strong-boned face. “Yes? How may I help you? I don’t believe I’ve—” The blue gaze slid past Charles and fastened on Mélanie. “Good Lord.” The eyes widened. The shoulders straightened. The voice deepened with the resonance of a cello. “‘’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white/Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on.’”

Mélanie had been looking ill a moment before, but she gave a laugh that had the sparkle of fine champagne. “How very flattering. I can’t answer for the Countess Olivia, but I fear in my case nature gets assistance from a shocking amount of paint and lotions.”

A look of pure delight crossed Hugo Trevennen’s face. “A beauty and versed in Shakespeare.” He peered at Mélanie down the bridge of his aquiline nose. “Do I know you, my dear? Appalling that I could have forgotten such a face, but living in this place does strange things to the memory.”

Mélanie gave him a smile that was a perfect combination of the daughterly and the flirtatious. Charles watched Trevennen melt like candle wax beneath its warmth. “No, we haven’t met. I’m Mélanie Fraser and this is my husband, Charles. We’d be very much obliged if we could have a word with you. It’s about your niece, Helen.”

Trevennen’s brows shot up. “My word. Nelly. Yes, of course. Delighted to be of help—if I can.” He smoothed his coat. The coat was threadbare and cut in a frocked style that was thirty years out of date, but the fabric was expensive and the frayed shirt beneath was spotless and carefully starched. “Do come in.”

He ushered them into a small, low-ceilinged room. Theatrical prints hung on the peeling wallpaper, and racing forms were stacked on the tabletop. The carpet looked like a Turkey rug but on closer inspection was painted canvas. Two high-backed chairs of a cheap pine painted to resemble walnut might have once graced the set of a Shakespearean drama. Charles suspected the painted screen in one corner had come from a production of The School for Scandal.

Trevennen waved them to the chairs. “Would you care for refreshment?” He swept his arm toward the tarnished brass kettle that hung from a hook over the fireplace, as though he were Prospero and could conjure crystal decanters and plates of cold salmon.

Mélanie sank onto one of the Shakespearean chairs. “Please don’t trouble yourself.”

“I’m afraid I don’t entertain much these days.” Trevennen scooped some coal from the coal scuttle and threw it on the fire. “When I think of the supper parties we used to have after a performance…But I fear my large style agreed not with the leanness of my purse.”

Charles sat in the other high-backed chair. “We understand Miss Trevennen inherited her acting talent from you.”

“You could say that.” Trevennen sank into an armchair, flicking back the skirts of his coat as if it was a sweeping cloak. “My Hamlet was considered quite good. In the provinces, you know. Of course, by the time I came to London, I played supporting roles. Quite a collection of Shakespearean dukes, and Hazlitt was pleased to comment on my Jaques. ‘And so, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,/And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,/And thereby hangs a tale.’” He frowned, as though this cut a bit too close to the bone. “Oh, you wanted to talk about Helen, didn’t you? What’s she been up to, then?”

Charles recited the story about Jennings and the legacy left to Helen Trevennen.

Trevennen listened with the detached interest of an actor hearing the plot of an amusing new play. Perhaps after so many years in the Marshalsea, everything in the outside world seemed like theatrical illusion. “Nelly. Such a pretty little girl. A wheedler from the first, mind, but even then ‘custom could not stale her infinite variety.’”

“When did you see her last?” Charles asked.

Trevennen stared out the window. The iron spikes on the outer wall of the prison were visible through the mildew-filmed glass. “Must be seven or eight years ago. She was never one for regular visits, but she used to appear every so often, usually when she wanted some sort of advice about the theater or racing. She was almost as fond of the horses as I am, though a bit less prodigal. I helped her get her position at the Drury Lane. She made a charmingly innocent Hero and I heard she did a very fetching Constance Neville in her last season. I wasn’t able to attend the performances by that time, of course. Still, I quite looked forward to her carrying on the family name. Then one day this friend of hers—charming young lady—called to say Helen had been obliged to leave London. Do you know where she took herself off to, then?”

“No,” Charles said. “We were hoping you would know, or at least have some idea.”

Trevennen blinked. “Sorry, dear boy. Always fancied myself a fair judge of women, but never could predict what Nelly would do from one moment to the next. She drove my poor brother to distraction.”

“Is your brother still living, Mr. Trevennen?” Mélanie asked.

“No, Theodore went to his maker some ten years since. He was a parson with a living in Cornwall, near Truro. Lost his wife early and hadn’t the least idea how to bring up the girls, poor fellow. He was a dreadful puritan, which only served to make them more wild, if you ask me, but of course he never did.”

Charles seized hold of the new information in this speech. “Girls?” he said.

“Nelly and Susy. You haven’t met Susan? No, no reason you should, I suppose.” Trevennen smoothed his gray-brown hair back from his high forehead, less Prospero now than Falstaff, looking back with rueful regret. “She’s two years younger than Helen. Looks quite like her, though Nelly’s a blonde and Susy got her mother’s red hair. Nelly ran off to London when she was seventeen. Susy followed a year later. My brother washed his hands of the pair of them. Never saw them again as far as I know. But he’d stopped speaking to me to all intents and purposes when I took to the stage. It was quite a surprise when Helen appeared on my doorstep and said she wanted to tread the boards herself. Tried to do what was best for her.”

“I don’t doubt it, Mr. Trevennen.” Mélanie smiled at him. “Were the girls close?”

Trevennen snorted. “Close as Hermia and Helena.”

“I see. Sewing on the same sampler one minute, ready to tear each other’s eyes out the next?”

“Exactly. Do you have sisters, Mrs. Fraser?”

“One younger sister. It can be a complicated relationship.” One would swear Mélanie was telling the truth. Perhaps, Charles realized, she actually was telling the truth. He knew nothing about her real family, save that her father had been an actor and had died when she was fifteen. “Susan hasn’t heard from Helen in the last seven years either?” Mélanie asked.

“Susy hasn’t mentioned Nelly at all for longer than that. They had some sort of falling-out, though neither of them saw fit to explain it to me, and I thought it best to keep well clear. They shared rooms when Susy first came to London. Nelly was at the Drury Lane and Susy was an opera dancer at the Covent Garden. Then they must have quarreled about something or other. Nelly moved to finer rooms and Susy moved to Clerkenwell and neither of them mentioned the other when they came to visit me.”

“Is Miss Susan Trevennen still in Clerkenwell?” Charles asked.

“No.” Trevennen shifted his position in the chair as though he was trying to inch away from something. Falstaff gave way to Desdemona’s deceived father. “I know nothing of Nelly’s life in recent years. What I know of Susan’s I fear has been…unfortunate. A true daughter of the game.”

Charles felt Mélanie go still at this echo of the words she had quoted about herself, but her face betrayed nothing.

Trevennen’s shoulders sank deeper into the chair. “Susan is now employed at the Gilded Lily. In Villiers Street, off the Strand.”

He seemed to think the name would not mean anything to Mélanie. Charles was fairly certain that it did, but he didn’t disabuse Trevennen.

Mélanie got to her feet with a gentle swish of her skirts. Before the men could rise, she dropped down beside Trevennen’s chair and pressed his hand. “Mr. Trevennen. Do you have any idea where Helen went?”

Trevennen looked at her with the air of a man longing to transform himself back into Hotspur or Prince Hal. His pale blue eyes filled with regret at having to disappoint her. For an instant, Charles had a sheer craftsman’s admiration for his wife’s technique. “I’m afraid not,” Trevennen said. “Knowing Nelly, she hasn’t immured herself in some backwater.”

“Did she ever mention any friends, in London or outside of it?”

“Nelly was never one to volunteer information, unless she thought it could get her something, and then the odds were it wouldn’t be truthful.”

Mélanie sat back on her heels. “Did she ever seem afraid of anything? Or anyone?”

“Nelly?” Trevennen threw back his head and gave a rich laugh that echoed off the low ceiling as though it were the rafters of the Drury Lane. “‘Of all base passions, fear is most accurs’d.’ Or so Nelly would have claimed. We Trevennens may be a foolish lot, Mrs. Fraser, but we don’t frighten easily, and Nelly had more courage than my brother and I put together.”

Charles got to his feet. “One last question, Trevennen. Has anyone else asked you about your niece recently?”

“About Nelly?” Trevennen shook his head. “Good God, no. I don’t get many visitors and I doubt most of the people here even remember I have two nieces.”

Charles nodded. “A dark-haired man with a Spanish accent was asking questions about her at the theater. I’d advise you not to talk to him. We have reason to think he doesn’t wish Miss Trevennen well.”

Trevennen squared his shoulders with the dignity of King Lear. “Don’t worry, Fraser. I don’t volunteer information to anyone I don’t care for.”

A light rain was falling when Charles and Mélanie stepped back out onto the gallery. The wind slapped against the stone, bringing a sour smell from the ground below and warning of a more violent storm to come. The gallery was crowded with visitors hurrying home and Marshalsea residents hurrying back to their rooms before the storm hit.

“I take it the Gilded Lily is a brothel,” Mélanie said. The press of the crowd forced her to walk close to Charles, but she hadn’t taken his arm.

“It is.”

“I won’t ask how you know,” she said, as they reached the head of the stairs. “Shall we try it first or—”

She got no farther. Charles, his gaze focused inward, didn’t see what actually happened. One moment Mélanie was speaking. The next, she gave an abrupt cry and fell headlong down the steps to the hard stone below.