Secrets of a Lady (aka Daughter of the Game)
Secrets of a Lady: Chapter 19

“Colin is a sensible boy,” Blanca said. “He’ll know you and Mr. Fraser will come for him.” She was doing up the strings on Mélanie’s evening gown with trembling fingers that pulled at the silk.

“He’s always had such faith in his parents. I hope—” Mélanie swallowed, her throat dry, the supper she had forced herself to eat roiling in her stomach. “I hope his faith proves warranted.”

“Don’t be foolish, Mélanie. You and Mr. Fraser are ten times more clever than Señor Carevalo. I never thought he had much wit for all his—how do you say it?—for all his swagger. Oh, Dios.” This last was because one of the strings had snapped off in Blanca’s hand.

Mélanie shut her mind to images of failure while Blanca stitched the string back onto the frock and finished doing up the ties. Ridiculous to be fussing with evening dress at this of all times. But though Mannerling’s gaming hell might be raffish, proper attire would be expected. She had left Edgar downstairs in the library to help Charles dress, after the three of them and Laura Dudley had choked down mouthfuls of soup and coffee in uneasy silence. Edgar had made no further reference to Charles’s revelations about Kitty Ashford or to his own abrupt exit. Mélanie doubted that he would have even had Laura not been present, but the memory of Charles’s story had reverberated through the room nonetheless.

Blanca did up the last string and gave Mélanie’s shoulders a quick squeeze, then picked up the curling tongs and plunged them into the chimney of the Agrand lamp. Mélanie sat at her dressing table and began to brush French rouge, ordered every month from the best parfumerie in Paris, onto her cheeks and lips. The actions were mechanical. Her thoughts were on the revelations in the library. How could she have lived with Charles, have been his wife, scarce seven months after Kitty Ashford’s death and never caught a hint of his torment? She had known he battled his own demons, but she had put it down to his troubled relationship with his parents. Surely she should have been able to see it was something more recent.

She reached for her eye-blacking with fingers that were not quite steady. She’d never thought of herself as a romantic, but the truth was, she had fallen victim to her own fairytale version of what she had meant to Charles, as florid as any lending-library novel. She had let herself be seduced by the belief that he had opened his heart to her as he had to no one else before or since. She had deceived him, but she had thought that she knew every corner of his soul, that she had broken down every barrier, that he was wholly hers. She was well served for her folly.

The truth was that she was jealous. She had no right to Charles’s love, but she was jealous of what he had felt for a woman who had been dead before she met him.

Her hand jerked, smearing the blacking beneath her eye. She wiped it away, more viciously than was necessary, dusted a light film of powder over her face and décolletage, and forced herself to sit still while Blanca set to work on her hair.

A memory shimmered in her mind, sweet as hedgerow brambleberries, painful as a knife beneath her nails. She and Charles had been married less than two years and were visiting the Fraser estate in Scotland for the first time before going to the peace congress in Vienna. The French had been driven out of Spain. Napoleon had abdicated and been sent to Elba, but already plans to help him escape were brewing. Once they got to the congress, she would be in the thick of the plotting, but on that trip to Scotland, far removed from the world of politics, she had shut her mind to all thoughts of intrigue and luxuriated in the simple pleasures of a holiday.

Charles had woken her and Colin early to give them their first sight of the beach. They walked side by side along the sand, Charles carrying Colin on his shoulders. Colin laughed with glee, as though he knew he was home. She took off her stockings and half-boots and let the sand squish round her toes. She could still remember the shimmer of the sun striking gray stone and clear blue water and ivory sand. A sight so intense it hurt.

The quote she’d had engraved on the watch she gave Charles their second Christmas together echoed in her mind.

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.

She’d chosen the quote because she knew he loved the sea. But until that moment on the beach she hadn’t realized how much it meant to him.

Charles had been watching her watch the ocean. She turned her head and met his gaze. His eyes were steady, intent, a little questioning, more interested in gauging her reaction than imposing thoughts of his own. Something in his gaze pierced through the layers of lies and deceptions to an inner core she had almost forgotten existed. In that moment she realized that though he might not know her true name or any of the details of her life, he understood her as no one else ever had, not even Raoul. In a world gone mad, he was a constant she would never doubt.

Too early seen unknown, and known too late! But she couldn’t claim Juliet’s girlish naïveté. She’d walked into this with her eyes open. And it wasn’t his name she’d known too late, it was how she felt about him.

“Sorry.” Blanca unwound a curl from the tongs. “Too hot?”

“No.” Mélanie folded her hands in her lap. “It’s me. I can’t make my thoughts be still.”

Blanca pinned another coil of hair high on the crown of Mélanie’s head. “I know—Oh, the devil, as Addison would say, of course I don’t know, not really, not until—unless—I have little ones of my own. I can only imagine—” She coaxed a last ringlet to fall over Mélanie’s shoulder. “There. A bit wild, but that’s the sort of place you’re going.”

“Just the thing for a gaming hell.” Mélanie reached for her gloves.

Blanca set the curling tongs down on their stand and tidied the extra hairpins away in their porcelain box. Her lips trembled. “Oh, Mélanie, why can’t I—”

Mélanie got to her feet and gripped Blanca’s hands. “Waiting’s the hardest part. But there’s no sense in all of us going, and you need to be here to talk to Addison when he gets back.”

Blanca nodded, straightened her shoulders, and handed Mélanie her scarf and cloak.

Mélanie walked down the stairs, white gloves in hand, velvet cloak over her arm, skirt trailing behind her. On that first visit to Britain she’d been overwhelmed by the sheer scale on which Charles lived. She had always known that he was the grandson of a duke, that he was connected to half the British peerage, that he was the heir to estates in Scotland, England, and Ireland, a London town house, and an Italian villa. But in the relative simplicity of their lodgings in Lisbon—listening to Charles’s disparaging comments on rank and inherited privilege—his heritage had seemed more an abstract concept than the reality of who he was. Seeing him on his ancestral estate, surrounded by servants and tenants who had known him since he was a boy, there was no ignoring the world he had been born into. Whatever causes he espoused, that world would always be a part of him.

She paused at the base of the stairs. Michael, who was on duty in the hall, went to open the library doors for her. She smiled at him and he smiled back, concerned, yet mindful of his place. The servants knew she and Charles were looking for Colin, but only Addison, Blanca, and Laura Dudley knew about Carevalo and the ring.

When she and Charles came to live in Britain after Waterloo, learning to manage a large household—several large households—had been a challenge in and of itself. For the first year, she’d had to bite her tongue to keep from apologizing to the servants for the charade of the roles society forced them all to play. Even today, she was sometimes brought up short by the realization of how her marriage to Charles had catapulted her neatly over an artificial and unconscionable social divide. Yet the longer one played a role, the more natural it became. She had grown all too comfortable with the privileges she had married into.

Because she had married Charles, her children had been born into that same world of privilege. Even now, thank God, Colin had the elite of British law enforcement searching for him. Most children were more likely to encounter Bow Street Runners because they were hauled before a magistrate. Only last month, Charles had had to use all his influence to intervene when their housemaid Morag’s nine-year-old cousin was sentenced to transportation for stealing a lace cap and two silk handkerchiefs. And for all the horror Mélanie had seen in Spain, nothing had quite prepared her for the story she’d heard one evening round a London dinner table, an account of a little boy who’d been sent to the gallows by good British justice and had gone to his death screaming for his mother. The boy had been six. Colin’s age.

Images of Colin and that unknown boy and her own sister chased themselves across her mind as she crossed the hall and stepped into the library. It was just past eleven, thirty maddening minutes more before they were to leave for Mannerling’s. Charles was sitting by the fireplace once again, but he had shaved and changed into a black evening coat, a waistcoat of ivory silk brocade, and black trousers, rather than the knee breeches he would have worn on a more formal occasion. Charles had little interest in fashion in the general run of things, but he had a keen eye for detail when playing a part. He had even stuck a diamond pin, which he rarely wore, in the folds of his cravat.

He turned his head at her entrance. “Edgar went up to the nursery to sit with Laura, though I think it was an excuse to avoid my company. He could scarcely look me in the eye while he was helping me dress.” Charles frowned into the shaving basin on the table beside him. “I can’t believe he was in love with Kitty. I can’t believe I wouldn’t have seen it. But I can’t deny the story unsettled him. Damn it, I shouldn’t have—”

“You couldn’t have avoided telling the story, Charles.” Mélanie set her cloak and gloves over a chair back, then walked to the mantel and realigned the silver candlesticks. She couldn’t bear to be still. “If he did love Kitty, the pain must be there all the time whether it’s forced into the open or not.”

“Edgar always tended to dally with women of the demimonde or pay court to virginal debutantes. I wouldn’t have thought Kitty—”

“Was in his usual style?” She rested her forehead against the chimney glass. The mirror felt cool against the pulse pounding in her brow. “We can’t choose whom we fall in love with, Charles. Or when we fall in love with them.” She turned from the mirror. “I remember the moment I knew I loved you. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it sooner.”

She expected him to turn her words aside, as he had every other time today when she’d claimed to love him. Instead he watched her with a steady gaze that neither accepted her statement nor gave it the lie. “When was this?”

“On our first visit to Scotland.”

“And yet you went on working for O’Roarke for another year.”

“Yes, I—” She moved away from the fireplace in three impatient strides. “Oh, God, what does it matter beside what’s happening to Colin? The details don’t change the picture.”

“We can’t do anything for Colin until we leave and we can’t leave for another half hour. I hate the waiting as much as you do. Tell me.”

She turned to him, fingers biting into the flesh of her arms. She’d trained herself so well never to speak of such things that it was difficult to replace the words. “For the rest of that trip I was determined to stop spying. I even thought of telling you the truth.”

“But—?”

“What could I have said? I married you because I was an enemy agent, but now I love you? You’d have laughed in my face.”

“Probably. And then? When we went to the congress? You didn’t stop spying.”

“No.” She turned and began to pace the carpet. The control that was second nature to her had cracked in pieces, leaving her throat raw, her voice unsteady. “Loving you didn’t change what I believed in. When we got to Vienna for the congress it was clear how things stood. Castlereagh—your Foreign Secretary, the man you worked for—wanted to turn the clock back on every reform made in Europe for thirty years. He and Metternich and most of the other men at the congress thought stability meant a world in which any dissent was stifled for fear of revolution. That isn’t the world I want my children to grow up in.”

“A world run by people like me.”

“If you’re going to define people by birth and fortune, yes. I don’t think that’s the future you want either, Charles.”

“Very true. I argued the point with Castlereagh on more than one occasion.”

“And where did it get you? What the hell’s the use of a lone voice arguing a point over a glass of port?” She stopped and turned to face him, breathing hard. “I’m sorry, Charles. But—”

“You thought putting Napoleon back in power would get you further than quiet diplomacy.”

“Yes.” A single word that summed up endless hours of inner turmoil. “And so I went on doing what I could. At the congress, and after Napoleon escaped and returned to France, and then when we went to Brussels with the allied army.”

“Where you watched Edgar and Fitzroy Somerset and the rest of our friends prepare to fight your countrymen at Waterloo.”

“What do you want me to say? That I felt guilty every time I smiled at a fresh-faced young ensign? I did, as it happens, but I’d never have survived if I hadn’t learned how to live with guilt long since. I had friends who fought on the French side who died as well.”

To her surprise, Charles drew in his breath. “I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “Of course you would have.” He pushed his fingers through his hair. “It was when we were in Brussels that you got so thin. I was afraid you were ill. I should have known—” He gave a mirthless smile. “That seems to be a dirge tonight, doesn’t it?”

Her heart twisted because it was so like Charles, when he must be choked with anger, to try to push past that anger and understand what had happened and why. She could not replace the words to explain what the days surrounding the Battle of Waterloo had been like. The fear, the hope, the despair, the sense that her divided loyalties would finally tear her in two. Are you going to be all right, querida? Raoul had asked a week before the battle. He’d been leaning against her carriage under cover of a seemingly chance meeting at a military review. She had just given him some information about troop movements gleaned from two careless young staff officers at her dinner table.

Afraid I’ll crack? She could hear her brittle tones even now.

No, he’d replied. I know you too well. He’d gripped her hand where it lay on the carriage door, as though he could feel the sharp bones through the thread-net of her glove. But I think you might break your health.

But in truth, there’d been no time for any sort of breakdown, mental or physical. During the battle, their house in Brussels had been filled with wounded soldiers for whom just taking their next breath was a struggle. She had dressed wounds and mopped burning foreheads and closed the eyes of the dead, and all the while wondered how she and Charles could possibly go on, whatever the outcome of the battle.

Charles was watching her closely. “After Waterloo when we went to Paris—it can’t have been easy for you.”

She remembered the horror of seeing the city her father had loved, the cradle of revolution, occupied by foreign troops. She thought of the men like Marshal Ney, who had died in the White Terror as the French royalists wreaked vengeance on those who had been loyal to Napoleon. She remembered walking with Charles beneath the Porte Saint-Martin. Someone had tried to obliterate the inscription from the stone but she’d been able to make out the words Liberté and Egalité. The ideals of the revolution might have been twisted and trampled on, but those words could still fire her heart. The sight of them scraped from the stone had brought home to her, as nothing else had, what the loss at Waterloo meant.

“No,” she said, “it wasn’t easy. But I knew then that whatever I did in the future, I’d have to replace a way to do it without deceiving you. I know I can’t make you believe that, darling—”

“I believe that much.” His gaze was still trained on her face.

“Why?”

“Because it was in Paris after Waterloo that you told me you wanted to have another child. You weren’t going to risk anything that tied you to me before then, were you?”

She looked into his clear gray eyes and thought of all the times she might have told him the truth. She wondered if anything would have been different if she had. “I was already tied to you in a hundred ways, darling. But I wasn’t going to risk making the tie stronger, no.”

“Until you decided your cause was lost.”

“No cause is ever completely lost, Charles. I’ll still fight for what I believe in. But I won’t lie to you.”

Charles stared at her as though he were trying to see beneath her skin. “And yet you thought you could spend the rest of your life playing a role.”

“I wasn’t playing a role. Not always. Not when I was with you.”

“Damn it, of course you were.” He leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair. “You turned yourself into a pattern card of the perfect wife for Charles Fraser. Didn’t you?”

“Of course not.”

He gave her a withering look. “Everything was calculated to perfection from the moment we met. Did O’Roarke tell you I liked Shakespeare?”

“No. Yes. But I’ve been quoting Shakespeare since I was a child. I didn’t put that on for your benefit.”

“But you made yourself into the perfect political hostess for my benefit. The perfect house, the perfect parties, the perfectly run nursery—”

“Don’t you dare, Charles. Don’t you dare imply the children have anything to do with my playing a part.”

“Even without the children, it’s a brilliant performance. For God’s sake, Mélanie, you were a revolutionary who was trying to turn the world upside down. This can’t be the life you wanted.”

“I’d look like a bloody hypocrite if I said it was, wouldn’t I?” She tugged the sheer fabric of her scarf about her shoulders.

“I know you, Mel.” He gave a brief laugh. “God, that’s rich, isn’t it? But I know you well enough to know that at times you must have been ready to scream with the longing to speak your mind. To box my ears and tell me what you really thought of me.”

“Of course I wanted to box your ears at times, Charles. I’m your wife. And if memory serves, I tell you what I think of you quite often.”

“But you could never talk freely. Not even to me. How could you, when you had to pretend to be the daughter of a man who fled France because he opposed the same revolution you were actually trying to defend?”

“What do you want me to say?” The words were ripped from somewhere beneath the bright veneer she had learned to wear like a second skin. “Of course I hated not being able to speak my mind—when I wasn’t buried so deeply in the part I was playing that I lost track of who I was entirely. Of course I sometimes think I’ll go mad if I have to fuss over one more seating arrangement or pay one more round of calls or pour out one more damned pot of tea.” She drew a breath. She hadn’t realized until now just how maddening the incessant round of such activities could be.

Charles regarded her, arms folded across his chest. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it. I suppose I assumed you enjoyed such activities because it was the life you’d been brought up to. If I thought about it at all, which I have a lowering feeling I didn’t. I was arrogant enough to think that the fact that I’d read Mary Wollstonecraft made me an egalitarian husband. I don’t know what’s more humiliating. The fact that all the time I thought our marriage was a model of equality and intellectual understanding, you were biting your tongue and catering to my every whim. Or the fact that I didn’t realize you were doing it.”

“I do a lot more than pour tea, Charles, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Acquit me of blindness, at least. You play the social game to perfection and you still manage to speak to reform societies and organize committees and write pamphlets. Not to mention writing half my speeches. That’s the woman I fell—” He glanced away. “You were wrong. You didn’t need to be some ideal of a perfect wife to hold me.”

She settled the folds of her scarf over her elbows, searching for the right words. Speaking the unvarnished truth was like picking her way through a foreign tongue. “It’s true, I tried to be what I thought you wanted in the beginning, because that was the way to succeed in my part and because that was the least I thought I owed you. But I’d never have stayed, I’d never have wanted to stay, if you’d wanted the sort of wife most men want. If I’d thought for one minute that all you cared about was having someone to plan your dinner parties and charm the opposition, if you hadn’t believed in so many of the things I believe in. I’d never have been able to survive for seven years if I hadn’t been able to be myself with you.”

He looked at her for a long moment, his gaze dark and opaque. “My God, Mel. After seven years of lies, how can you have the least idea of whether or not you can be yourself with me? How can you know yourself at all?”

Her fingers clenched on the gauzy folds of her scarf. She stared back at him, unable to replace an answer.

He reached for the walking stick that was leaning against his chair and pushed himself to his feet. “It’s nearly eleven-thirty. Let’s replace Edgar.”