Secrets of a Lady (aka Daughter of the Game)
Secrets of a Lady: Chapter 22

Mélanie choked, turned her head, and vomited onto the scoured marble tiles.

Charles gripped his wife’s shoulders. A sour taste clogged his own throat. He held Mélanie, one hand on her shoulder, the other wrapped round her waist, until the retching stopped. In his years in the Peninsula he had seen shattered skulls, entrails spilling onto the ground, heads cut from the body with the mouths still twitching and grimacing. Mélanie had seen as much. He had never known her to react like this, nor had he reacted so himself.

“My God.” Edgar’s voice came from behind him. “Are you sure—”

Mélanie wrenched herself away from Charles, wiped her hand across her mouth, turned back to the open box. “It’s Colin’s.”

Charles forced himself to follow her gaze. The branch of candles on the table cast all too much light on the contents of the box. It was a child’s pinkie finger, severed just below the second knuckle. Beneath the smears of blood, the skin was pale and creamy. Like Mélanie’s. Like Colin’s. But—“Are you certain?” he said. His voice didn’t sound like his own.

“It’s the little finger of his right hand.” Mélanie’s voice was without expression. “There’s a scratch by the second knuckle from where he fell down playing knights with Jessica yes—” Her voice caught as though she suddenly couldn’t breathe. “Yesterday.”

A cloud of rage darkened his vision. He ran his gaze over the box with deliberation. For the first time he noticed a white card tucked into the side. He picked it up by the corner. The writing on the card matched Carevalo’s letter this morning.

Just in case you think I don’t mean what I say.

He dropped the card on the table and snapped the lid of the box shut. “Michael. Go round to Mr. Roth at number Forty-two Wardour Street. If he’s not at home, try the Bow Street Public Office. Ask him to come to Berkeley Square as soon as possible. Tell Randall to ready the traveling chaise. We’ll leave for Brighton as soon as we’ve seen Roth. Is Addison back? Good. Have him and Blanca pack valises for Mrs. Fraser and me. Enough for a day or two. And tell Addison to pack some things for Captain Fraser as well.” He put his hand on the back of Mélanie’s neck. “Library.”

“We’d better bring the box,” she said in the same expressionless voice. “And the note. Roth should see them. Edgar, perhaps you could—”

“Yes, of course.” Edgar reached for the box, paused for a moment, then gathered up both it and the card.

They walked the few steps to the library without speaking, Charles still with his hand on the back of Mélanie’s neck. Inside the room, she pulled away from him and dropped down on the sofa, hugging her arms round her.

Edgar set the box and card on the table nearest the door and began to pace the carpet. “The bastard. The goddamned lily-livered, spineless, immoral—”

“Edgar.” Charles tugged his handkerchief from his pocket and splashed it with water from the pitcher on the drinks table. “That’s not helping.”

“I don’t think—” Mélanie spoke in a low, rough voice, her gaze on the carpet. “Part of me didn’t believe he’d go through with it until now.”

“Yes.” Charles dropped down in front of her and wiped her face with the damp handkerchief.

She jerked away from him. “Charles, we can’t—we don’t have time to wait for Roth,” she said, as though his words in the hall had only just registered with her.

“We can afford an hour.” He sat back on his heels, ignoring the twinge in his leg. “Roth should know about this. It may affect the search for the people who are holding Colin. And we should tell him we’re going to Brighton and what we’ve learned and how to reach us.”

She retched again. She was shuddering, hunched over, as if fighting some private war with herself.

“Do you want some tea?” Charles said. “Or—”

“I’m all right, Charles.” The words slapped against his skin. “I don’t need cosseting. Colin does.”

In two swift motions he was off the floor and on the sofa beside her. “Christ, Mel. You don’t have to do this alone.” He gathered her against him.

“Goddamnit, Charles, what are we doing?” She flung his arms off her and sprang to her feet. “We’ve been running round London all day sipping tea and swilling brandy and all the time Colin was—”

“Colin’s alive. We’re doing what we have to do to get him back. That’s all that matters.”

“We’re not doing a very good job of it, are we?” She paced the length of the room, her hands pressed against her sides, as though she would either shatter from the force of her feelings or break her bones in the effort to contain them. “You can’t control this, Charles. You can’t think your way out of it. Sacrebleu, those jagged cuts—He’s always so brave about inoculations, but a knife—”

“He needs you, Mel.”

“Dios, Charles, that’s just the point.” She whirled round, claret silk skirts snapping about her legs. Her eyes glittered with rage, but tears shimmered on her cheeks. “He needs us and we—”

Charles crossed to her side. “I need you.”

The pain that filled her eyes was more than anyone should have to bear. “Don’t, Charles.” Her voice slashed at him. “Don’t try to manage me.”

“I’m not.” He wrapped his arms round her stiff body. “I meant it.”

For a moment she held herself rigid; then she made a choking sound and buried her face in his throat.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice muffled by her hair. “I’m fussing over you because I can’t fuss over Colin.”

Her fingers gripped the cloth of his coat, tight with desperation. On the edge of his consciousness, he was aware of Edgar slipping from the room. He rested his chin on Mélanie’s head. Her ribs shook. He could feel the bandage beneath her gown. Something jabbed him in the shoulder. Her pendant. His anniversary gift to her.

She felt the same in his arms tonight as she had yesterday. Every line and angle of her body was familiar. The scent of her skin, the silky texture of her hair, the hitch in her breathing as she struggled for self-command.

Marriage was supposed to endow one with knowledge of one’s spouse, carnal and otherwise. So much about Mélanie was still alien to him, and yet he knew her in a host of ways. The exact amount of boiled milk she put in her coffee; the way she curled her fingers to hide the ink stains on her nails when she’d been at her writing desk; the precise chord in “Dove Sono” that always brought tears to her eyes.

Whatever else she had been, whatever she had done, whatever the reasons for their marriage, she was his wife. He knew now that she always would be, though he could not say with any certainty what those words meant for the shape of their future life.

“Why?” She spoke at last, her face still pressed into his cravat. “Why did he think he needed to do it?”

“To convince us he was in earnest.” He smoothed her damp hair back from her temples. “It worked, too, damn his soul to hell.”

“He—” She lifted her head to look at him. Her eye-blacking had smeared below her lashes. Beneath the stains were blue shadows of fear and exhaustion. “Charles, I’ve been deluding myself that we could fix this. That if we could only get Colin back we could somehow make everything right, at least for him. But we’ll never be able to do that—to put everything back the way it was before.”

He put his hand against the side of her face and stroked her cheek. “He can learn to live without a finger, Mel.”

She shook her head. “That’s going to be the least of the damage.”

“Colin’s tough. He can learn to live with the other hurts as well.” He tucked her hair behind her ear. “You and I both did.”

“Did we?” she said. He saw the scars of his own past reflected back at him in her gaze. “Haven’t we faced the fact over and over today that we really haven’t?”

Before he could answer, the door swung open. Edgar came back into the room, carrying a tea tray. “Nursery lessons never fade.” His voice was as bright as the gleaming silver of the tea service. “When in a crisis, brew a pot of tea.” He set the tray down on the library table and began to pour. “Oh, damn,” he added in a different voice, as tea spattered into the saucer and sloshed onto the table. “I’m afraid my hands aren’t very steady.”

“None of ours are.” Mélanie moved back to the sofa and peeled off her gloves.

Edgar pressed cups of sweet, scalding tea into both their hands. The three of them sat in silence until Michael ushered Jeremy Roth into the room.

Charles got to his feet. “Thank you for coming, Roth. I know it’s late.”

Roth waved aside the apology. His coat was rumpled and his neckcloth looked even more hastily tied than usual. He scanned Charles’s face, then looked at Mélanie. “What’s happened?” His voice had a new sharpness.

“Carevalo decided to show us he meant business. He sent us that box on the table by the door. It—” Charles swallowed and found his throat raw. “Colin’s finger is inside.”

“His…Dear God.” Roth snapped open the lid of the box, snapped it shut, and put his hand to his mouth. “I see a lot of horror in the course of my job,” he said after a moment, “but…Not a pleasant man, this Carevalo.”

“No.” Charles gestured Roth to a chair. “But we already knew that.”

Roth dropped into the chair and fixed his gaze on Mélanie. “Carevalo still has every reason to keep the boy alive.”

Mélanie nodded. Her face had the set pallor of wax. “Unless we fail to produce the ring by Saturday. We have less than four days.”

Roth didn’t try to offer false reassurance, as he might have this morning. He was coming to know Mélanie. “True, I’m afraid.” He accepted the cup of tea Edgar was holding out to him. “You’ve learned more?”

Charles returned to the sofa and told him of their visit to Susan Trevennen—glossing over the details of the gunshot, but mentioning his glimpse of Carevalo’s royalist cousin Victor Velasquez—and then recounted the news they’d received from Jemmy Moore.

“Impressive.” Roth scribbled in his notebook, then flipped to an earlier page. “We’ve made a bit of progress ourselves. One of my men brought me a report not two hours ago. Harry Rogers was in full view of half of St. Giles at the Pig and Whistle from nine o’clock last night until well into the morning. A man who sounds astonishingly like Bill Trelawny held up a mail coach on Hounslow Heath at eleven last night. That means the man Polly saw is probably Jack Evans or Stephen Watkins. We haven’t been able to replace any word of Watkins. Someone thinks they glimpsed Evans drinking in a tavern in Wapping earlier this afternoon.”

Mélanie stirred her tea for the third time without drinking it. “Then it’s most likely Watkins who has Colin?”

“Most likely, but it’s possible Evans has your son and was foolish enough to go out in public. He may not realize we have a description of him. I’ve got a patrol making inquiries in the vicinity of the tavern.” Roth reached for his cup and took a quick swallow of tea. “I’ll get a description from your footman of the boy who brought the parcel, see if we can trace him and the man who gave it to him. Though if they have any brains at all, the parcel changed hands several times before it got here.”

Charles tossed down a mouthful of tea. It had grown lukewarm, but it eased the rawness in his throat. “Michael said Addison’s back, but we haven’t talked to him yet.”

“I have.” Roth set down his cup without looking up from his notebook. The cup tilted at a precarious angle against the side of the saucer. “He stopped by Bow Street on his way home. He got no news of the ring from his inquiries with the jewelers, and neither did Miss Mendoza. He gave me a list of the places they visited. They’re a very capable pair. I told Mr. Addison if they ever tire of working for you and Mrs. Fraser, I’d be happy to employ them. Two of my men talked with various fences this afternoon. Nothing there either.”

“That doesn’t prove she didn’t sell the ring,” Charles said, “but it does make it less likely.”

Roth nodded. “Quite. We’ve had no luck so far tracing Carevalo himself. For such a gregarious man, he played his cards close to his chest. He had a number of acquaintances, but no friends intimate enough to have any idea where he might have gone to earth.” He spun his pencil between his fingers. “This Victor Velasquez. You say you don’t believe any good would come of talking to him?”

“None.” Charles eased his right leg straight. It had begun to throb.

“I’ll take your word for it. But there’s no reason I can’t have one of my lads keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t follow you to Brighton. Do you know where he lodges?”

“The Albany.”

Roth jotted down a note, then looked up at them. “Miss Trevennen is no doubt living under an assumed name in Brighton. You have a plan for trying to trace her?”

Charles exchanged a look with Mélanie. They hadn’t discussed it, but the solution was obvious. “Aunt Frances.”

“Oh, God.” Edgar, who had dropped his head into his hands, looked up with a groan.

“She’s the logical choice.” Mélanie sounded almost like herself again. “Lady Frances has ruled Brighton society for years,” she said to Roth. “She knows everyone.”

Charles got up and went to stir the fire, though it was blazing briskly. “She’s also my mother’s younger sister and my godmother. She has a sharp tongue, but she’ll help. You can contact us at her house on the Steyne, though there’ll always be someone here to relay messages.”

Roth picked up his cup again and stared at it for a moment. The firelight shone through the porcelain, turning the ecru a molten orange. “Why do you think Miss Trevennen left London just after she got Jennings’s letter and the ring?” He looked up at Mélanie with the glint of a chess player puzzling over a new gambit. “Coincidence?”

“I doubt it.” Mélanie unfastened her heavy earrings and rubbed her earlobes. The jerky shimmer of the diamonds betrayed her shaking fingers. “I suspect she was blackmailing someone.”

Charles replaced the poker and gave her a sharp look.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought of it, darling,” she said.

“No, it occurred to me during our talk with Susan Trevennen.” He rested his arm on the mantel. His hand closed on the marble, so hard that he felt the imprint of the carved oak leaves on his palm. “I’d have said something, but—”

“We got distracted.”

“Here now.” Edgar set down his teacup with a clatter. “Mind telling us mere mortals why this blackmail business is so obvious?”

Mélanie plucked at the spangled fabric of her scarf. “I wouldn’t call it obvious. But if you think about it…She told Violet Goddard and Jemmy Moore that her fortune had been made but she’d be in danger if anyone knew where she was. That would make sense if she was blackmailing someone but was afraid of what might happen to her if that person found her.”

“Well, yes—I suppose so.” Edgar shook his head. “Couldn’t Moore’s first idea be right? That she was going off with a man—perhaps even eloping—and wanted to cut herself off from her past?”

“Possibly.” Charles took a turn about the room, but movement couldn’t hold at bay the images that kept tugging at his mind, images of his son under a stranger’s knife. Had Colin screamed? He was a brave lad, but—“That doesn’t explain why she ran off right after Jennings’s death. If she’d found a wealthy lover or potential husband, I can’t see her letting Jennings stand in her way.”

He stopped and stared down at the onyx and alabaster of the chess set. A single pawn stood between the white king and checkmate. His fingers clenched with the impulse to sweep the pieces onto the carpet. The screams of men suffering amputations in field hospitals echoed in his head. Had they drugged Colin, tied him—“The night she received Jennings’s letter she told Violet Goddard that her fortune had been made. The next day she disappeared from the face of London. As Roth pointed out, it’s a stretch for the timing to be coincidence.”

Roth sat forward in his chair. “So the blackmail was based on something in Lieutenant Jennings’s letter? I admit it’s by far the neatest explanation. Any idea what that something might be?”

“None.” Charles moved behind the sofa and drummed his fingers on the coffee-colored velvet.

“A military scandal?” Mélanie said. “Was there anything Jennings was involved in or might have known about? You knew him a bit, didn’t you, Edgar?”

“We were nodding acquaintances. I wish—There were scandals enough among the officers. Duels that had to be hushed up. Liaisons with Spanish and Portuguese women.” Edgar avoided so much as a flicker of a glance at Charles as he said this last. “Jennings could have learned someone’s secrets, but I know of nothing definite.”

Roth slumped back in his chair and frowned up at the heavily molded ribs of the ceiling. “If someone’s been paying her to keep this secret for seven years, it must be something fairly explosive. She’d need some sort of proof. Love letters? Possible, I suppose.”

“Perhaps Jennings stumbled upon a procurement fraud,” Mélanie said, in the crisp voice she used when she was trying desperately to focus her mind. “There was a shocking amount of that sort of thing going on. Suppose Jennings found some incriminating papers?”

“Yes.” Roth blew the steam from his cup. “Perhaps I’m a cynic, but I replace it easier to imagine a man paying money for seven years to cover up fraud than to cover up a love affair.” He sipped the tea. “Or suppose Jennings had uncovered proof that someone was involved in espionage?”

He said this last casually. Charles thought he meant it casually. Probably. Mélanie did not react with so much as the tremor of a finger.

“Fraud and espionage are both possibilities.” Charles perched on the arm of the sofa beside his wife. “Jennings could have stumbled upon all sorts of secrets—his game with the ring certainly proves he was devious and had an eye for the main chance.”

“Or suppose—” Mélanie broke off and stared up at him. Her face had gone white. “My God, we’re sitting here speculating, while Colin—”

“We’re speculating so we can get him back,” Charles said. The words came out with a harsh rasp he hadn’t intended. He had a sudden impulse to fling his Sèvres teacup into the fireplace, as though destroying something would ease the knot of frustration in his chest.

Roth’s gaze moved from Charles to Mélanie, missing little. “Quite a pair, Jennings and Miss Trevennen. A gift for survival, though in the end it seems to have failed Jennings.” Roth stared at the chewed end of his pencil. “I stopped at Raoul O’Roarke’s hotel this afternoon, but he was out. You’re sure he can’t tell us more?”

“As sure as we can be,” Charles said.

“Because from what you’ve described, the ring would benefit his cause as much as Carevalo’s.” Roth doodled on the blank page before him. “You think he’d cavil at using a child where Carevalo would not?”

“I don’t know about that,” Charles said. “But he knew I’d break his neck this morning if he didn’t tell us the truth. More to the point, Carevalo would know it. He’d never have let O’Roarke meet us if O’Roarke had been able to betray him.”

“Sound reasoning.” Roth closed the notebook and looked up at Charles. His gaze was mild, pleasant, and as sharp as a knife. “So why did O’Roarke come to see you this morning so soon after you called on him?”

“My dear Roth, have you been having us followed?” Charles said.

“Hardly.” Roth smiled, but the sharpness didn’t leave his eyes. “I made some inquires about O’Roarke while I was at his hotel. One of the clerks heard him direct a hackney here an hour or so after you left the hotel this morning.”

“Yes, he did.” Mélanie’s voice was the most normal it had been in the entire interview. “He wanted to assure us again that he would do whatever was in his power to help.”

Roth leaned forward, hands between his knees. “Mr. Fraser. Mrs. Fraser. It would be redundant to say that this is a serious matter. Carevalo has made sure we know that. I’ve seen enough today to realize that you love your son as much as any parents could and that you know full well the jeopardy he’s in. Is there anything you haven’t told me?”

“I say, Roth,” Edgar said, “that’s a damned—”

“It’s all right, Edgar. Roth’s just doing his job thoroughly.” Charles looked at Roth, aware of Mélanie’s stillness beside him. “We’d have to be fools to hold anything back, Roth. Whatever else my wife and I are, neither of us is a fool.”

Roth regarded him for a moment. “No. You certainly aren’t that.” He got to his feet. “I won’t keep you. I know you’re eager to be on your way to Brighton. Thank you for the tea.”

At the door, he turned back, one hand resting against the polished panels. “I hope you realize how seriously I take this. No harm will come to your son if it is within my power to prevent it.” He inclined his head and left the room.

Edgar shook his head. “What the devil was that about?”

“Roth questions everything.” Charles got up from the sofa. “It’s what makes him a good investigator.”

“I suppose so. Still, to be questioning you, of all people—You have told him everything, haven’t you?”

“As Charles said, we’d be fools not to.” Mélanie picked up her gloves and earrings. “I’m going up to change.”

Charles accompanied her upstairs. Addison and Blanca were both waiting in the bedchamber, with valises packed, traveling clothes laid out, and a multitude of questions that they heroically did not voice. But explanations were the very least they deserved, so while they helped him and Mélanie into traveling clothes, he and Mélanie recounted the most recent events.

Addison and Blanca listened without comment until it came to Colin’s severed finger. At that, Addison went very white and dropped one of Charles’s top boots, and Blanca launched into a tirade in furious Spanish.

“What do you want us to do?” Addison said at last, gripping Blanca’s arm. “Make more inquiries about the ring?”

Charles shook his head. “I think we’ve done what we can. Go to Surrey and call on Mrs. Jennings. Find out if Victor Velasquez has been to see her and what if anything she knew about Helen Trevennen. And sound her out about any possible information her husband may have had that Miss Trevennen could be using for blackmail.”

Addison and Blanca both nodded. They were standing side by side. For the first time, Charles noticed that their hands were clasped. Addison had been in Charles’s employ since Charles was at Oxford, and in all those years, Blanca was his first serious love—or at least, the first Charles had known of. Addison still didn’t know that the woman he loved had been in the employ of French Intelligence. Poor devil. For a moment, Charles found himself wishing that Addison and Blanca, at least, could be left free of this hell. But now that the truth was out, they could none of them hide from it.

Blanca and Addison took the luggage downstairs. Charles picked up his walking stick. “Do you think we can look in on Jessica without waking her?”

“Let’s risk it.” Mélanie picked up a pair of doeskin gloves from her dressing table. “He’s right, you know, Charles.”

“He?” Charles was at the door.

“Roth.” Mélanie pulled on the gloves, tugging each finger smooth. “How can we justify keeping anything secret in the face of what’s happening to Colin?”

Charles strode across the room, dropped the walking stick, and took her by the shoulders. “For God’s sake, Mel, are you losing your grip? It would hardly help Colin if you and O’Roarke were hauled into Bow Street and questioned as foreign spies.” He released her and took a step back. “They’d probably decide I was one, too. They’d never believe I could have been married to you for so long and not have known the truth.”

Something flinched in the depths of her eyes. “If they thought that, they’d be woefully underestimating my abilities, darling.”

“Or overestimating mine.”

Mélanie picked up her bonnet by its gray silk ribbons. “You’re right, of course. I was being silly. But Roth suspects something. And he doesn’t strike me as a man who’ll abandon his suspicions.”

“Even if he could guess at the truth—which I doubt—I don’t see how he could possibly prove it.”

“Oh, darling, he wouldn’t have to prove it. He’d just have to drop a word of his suspicions in the Home Secretary’s ear. Can you imagine the kick-up? I don’t—” She unwound the ribbons, which had twisted round her fingers. “I don’t want your parliamentary career to be hurt, Charles.”

“You might have thought of that before you started this farce. If you’d been caught during the war, we both could have been shot as spies.”

Denial flashed in her eyes. “I’d never have let them accuse you.”

“How? Do you imagine your word would have meant anything? You can control a lot, Mel, but you couldn’t control that. It was an implicit risk from the moment you married me.”

She swallowed, but she didn’t try to deny it. She was too honest. “It was a risk,” she admitted.

“But probably a small risk. Without proof, they’d have hesitated to execute the Duke of Rannoch’s grandson as a spy. I’d never have been trusted again, of course. At best I’d have been branded a fool. At worst a man who destroyed his honor. One could make a good argument that both are true.”

She shook her head. “The gentleman’s code again. ‘What is honor? A word.’”

“Words can have a lot of power.”

“And they can mask the truth. My God, Charles, you know better than to think honor has any chance of surviving in the midst of a war. It gets drowned in blood in the first battle.”

“One can still live by one’s own code, even then. Especially then.” He looked into her eyes, feeling the slash of her earlier accusations. “But I suppose you’d claim that my own actions in the war violated my code long before I met you.”

“Only if you make that code so simple that everything’s reduced to clear-cut choices,” Mélanie said. “And you’re not a man to do that. You see all sides of a question better than anyone I know. But ultimately you had to make a choice or let all your thoughts ‘be nothing worth.’ You had a loyalty to your country and your allies and that loyalty came first. So you swallowed your scruples and deceived people for the information they could give you, information which your side could turn against theirs.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have?” he demanded.

“I’m saying you didn’t have any choice, given where your loyalty lay. Any more than I did.”

“Damn it, Mélanie—”

“Tell me you don’t know what it is to look into the eyes of the deceived and see trust, Charles. To draw innocent confidences from people, knowing all the while that you’re going to use those confidences against them.”

Her clear gaze cut through to a painful welter of memories. The family of afrancesados who had given him shelter and the boy with hero worship in his eyes. A Jesuit priest who had confided his hopes for Spain under Joseph Bonaparte to the disguised Charles and had quite unwittingly betrayed the disposition of the local French garrison. A young French sentry who had shared a flask of brandy with Charles and confessed his fear of battle, until the laudanum Charles had put into the brandy knocked him out, and Charles was able to steal the dispatches from his coat. “You’re saying I forced others to betray their friends even as you forced me to betray mine?” he said.

“You picked up military secrets from drunken soldiers in taverns. You gave out false information about British troop movements. You stole documents from people whose trust you’d won. If the people you deceived knew how you used them, I expect they’d be just as sick with self-disgust at what they’d colluded in as you are at the things you confided to me.”

The impulse to give the lie to everything she had said choked his throat, but he could not speak the words. She had thrown a glass up to his face. As ugly as the reflection was, he could not look away from it.

“So we’re equally tainted by our actions?” he said. His voice was harsh, but he couldn’t have said whether the anger was directed more at her or at himself.

“I don’t think anyone could have emerged from the hell of the war untainted. But equally? Oh, no, my darling. In my case I deceived and betrayed the man to whom I’d sworn vows of fidelity, which makes the betrayal a hundredfold worse.”

But did it change the nature of the betrayal? He looked into her eyes and found he could not answer his own question. Every qualm, every doubt, every twinge of guilt he’d ever felt, turned aside at the time by the exigencies of the moment, now echoed through his mind and senses.

Mélanie tugged at the stiff lace of her collar. “I suspect Roth’s remark about Jennings stumbling across espionage was just a random shot, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

“Nor could I.” He regarded her for a moment, his keen-eyed stranger of a wife. “Do you think it’s possible?”

“That Helen Trevennen is blackmailing someone who was a French spy? Of course it’s possible. I can vouch that it’s not the sort of thing one likes to have bandied about.” She stared at him. “Sacrebleu, Charles, did you think she was blackmailing me?”

He looked back at her without flinching. “At this point, nothing would surprise me.”

She swallowed. “I deserved that. She wasn’t blackmailing me. Any chance you’ll believe me?”

He let his gaze move over her face. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Once you knew she had the ring, I think you’d have admitted the truth.”

She released her breath, a faint, harsh scrape of sound. “Thank you.”

Charles retrieved his walking stick which he’d leaned against her dressing table. “If not you, who else?”

“I didn’t know the identity of every French agent in the British army, darling.”

“Does O’Roarke know?”

“He’d know more than I do.”

“Good. When we come back from Brighton I’ll have a talk with him.” He moved to the door. “Ready?”

They walked down the corridor and eased open the door of Jessica’s room. She was curled up beneath her rose-patterned quilt. The cat, Berowne, had settled himself next to her on the pillow. Her cheek was pressed against his gray fur. Her left hand rested on the white spot on his stomach, as though she had fallen asleep stroking him.

Charles looked down at his daughter. Her porcelain skin, the short curve of her nose, the long lashes veiling her cheeks. The delicate fingers resting against the cat’s fur. The rage he had held in check throughout the scenes in the library and bedchamber slammed against every cell of his body, like a storm striking the rocky Perthshire coast.

Mélanie bent down, smoothed the quilt, brushed her lips across Jessica’s brow, touched her fingers to Berowne’s head. Charles did the same, committing the moment to memory. Jessica’s brow furrowed, then relaxed. Berowne purred softly. After a long moment, without looking at each other, he and Mélanie left the room.

“Charles.” Mélanie stopped midway down the empty, candlelit corridor. Her gaze was fixed on a watercolor on the wall opposite. “If you want a divorce, I’ll give you grounds as long as you don’t keep the children from me. Or the cat.”

The words were like a fistful of snow down his back. “When did I say I wanted a divorce?”

“You said you never wanted to see me again.” She turned her head. The light from the candle sconces fell at a sharp angle across her drawn face. “The least I owe you is the right to start over again.”

“Christ, Mel. After all you’ve been through, haven’t you learned that we can’t any of us start again? I may have been a fool to marry you, but I can’t erase the past seven years.” He looked at the watercolor, a painting Mélanie had done of the stream on their Perthshire estate. The cool grays and mossy greens always brought an ache of longing to his throat. “What were you proposing to do? Hire some half-pay officer to get caught in bed with you?”

She regarded him with that unblinking courage he knew so well. “If that’s what it takes.”

His hand clenched with the impulse to wipe that look from her face. “You may be willing to put the children through that. I’m not.”

She swallowed. She was either too brave or not brave enough to leave it there. “Then—”

The image of the watercolor wavered before his eyes. He had a vivid memory of Mélanie picking her way over the mossy stones of the stream bank with Colin while he followed with Jessica on his shoulders. He looked into her eyes and said what he hadn’t yet articulated even to himself. “I don’t know if I can go on living with you, Mel. A marriage based on preserving appearances would drive us both mad. But if you think I’d keep you from the children, you know me even less than I knew you. Shall we go? The carriage awaits.”