The Mask of Night
: Chapter 17

I’ll say this for Julien St. Juste. The man is nothing if not efficient.

Mélanie Lescaut to Raoul O’Roarke,

22 October, 1811

London,

January, 1820

‘The Wanderer?” Charles studied his wife’s still figure, outlined against the brown velvet library curtains.

‘St. Juste never told me what it meant. Given all the different masters he served, it could relate to anything. I don’t even know if it’s a person or an object. I asked Raoul the next time I saw him. He said he’d never heard of anything or anyone called the Wanderer.’

Charles reached into his pocket. “I found this in the trunk in St. Juste’s room.” He held the peacock blue ribbon up so it caught the candlelight.

Mélanie’s fingers tensed against the velvet for a moment. “I told you he liked blue.”

“Peacock blue. Apparently torn from a lady’s gown. You said he tore one of the ribbons from your gown?”

“I doubt it was a unique occurrence.”

“The color matches.”

“You can’t—“

“I remember the dress.”

She met his gaze. The memories between them were so thick he could feel the slithery silk ties that fastened the gown, taste the warmth of the creamy skin at the crook of her neck.

Mélanie moved to draw the curtains on the last of the windows. “It doesn’t necessarily mean—“

“It means he didn’t forget you. I wondered if O’Roarke was looking for you at the ball. Now I’m beginning to think St. Juste was.”

“That doesn’t make sense, Charles. I could have blown his cover.”

“Not if he held the threat of your past over you.”

“Raoul would have told him—“

“You think O’Roarke would have tried to protect you?”

She tugged the curtain smooth. “I don’t know.’

‘Why did Queen Hortense come to London?’

Mélanie picked up the tinderbox and lit the tapers on the mantle. In seven years, how had he failed to see how very good she was at employing delaying tactics? ‘To retrieve some papers concerning the birth of her son. St. Juste had warned her about them.’

‘St. Juste had— Start at the beginning, Mel.’

The second taper flared to life. In the almost-undetectable pause he could tell she was still sorting out how much to reveal. She turned from the mantle and told him about the papers concerning Hortense and Flahaut’s baby that Carfax had supposedly coerced or stolen from St. Juste. In the end, Charles thought she’d given him the whole story. Or very nearly the whole.

‘Do you believe her?’ he said.

‘I don’t see why she’d lie. And it fits with what we know about St. Juste.’

‘You’ve arranged to see her again?’

‘In two days.’

Charles watched his wife for a moment. ‘You’re going to steal the papers from Carfax.’

‘I really think you’re better off not knowing the answer to that, darling.” She set the tinderbox down on the mantle. ‘I almost didn’t tell you. I wouldn’t have if it didn’t involve St. Juste.’

‘I’m not insensible of that. But what the devil are you afraid Carfax would do—’

‘To him the child would be a piece to be maneuvered. Two months ago you were quite prepared to think your government might treat Colin as a pawn.’

For a moment, the terror of Colin’s abduction scalded him. ‘I’ll get the papers for you.’

‘Charles—’

‘We’ll decode them and make sure they are what Queen Hortense says they are, and then you can return them to her.’

‘I wanted to keep you out of it.’

‘A noble aim, sweetheart, but a bit naïve. I’m in it now regardless. It will be easier for me to get access to Carfax’s things.’

‘And you won’t have to worry about an ex-Bonapartist spy riffling through his papers.’

‘That too. What does Flahaut know about this?’

‘Nothing as far as I know.’

‘It’s a bit too coincidental that St. Juste warned Queen Hortense about these papers, and quite separately Flahaut was following St. Juste on Tallyerand’s orders.’

‘Not necessarily. Talleyrand could suspect St. Juste kept papers relating to the child but not know St. Juste gave them to Carfax.’

‘And then there’s the fact that I found coded papers in St. Juste’s rooms that appear to me to be in Talleyrand’s hand. We only have Flahaut’s word for it that Talleyrand wasn’t working with St. Juste and O’Roarke. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time O’Roarke and Talleyrand have been allies.’

‘But they’ve taken different paths since Waterloo. Raoul loathes the Bourbon government while Talleyrand’s worked with it.’

‘Talleyrand is nothing if not flexible in his allegiances. And he hasn’t fared as well under the Bourbon restoration as he’d have hoped.” Charles studied his wife’s face. “Does Talleyrand know who you really are?”

She swallowed. “Yes. In Vienna he never gave any indication he suspected I was more than a British diplomat’s wife. But in Paris I realized he knew the truth. He assured me he had no reason to reveal it.”

Charles saw Talleyrand’s shrewd face clear in his mind’s eye for a moment. Another man he’d known since boyhood. Another man who had known the truth about his wife long before he did himself. “Whatever his connection to St. Juste, Talleyrand was right about one thing. I don’t for a moment believe it was a coincidence that St. Juste seduced Lord Carfax’s daughter.” He crossed to the high-backed chair beside the fireplace and leaned his arms along its back. ‘Tell me about Bel.’

A shadow crossed Mélanie’s face, but she was too professional to hesitate. She sat on the sofa opposite him and recounted her interviews with Sylvie St. Ives and Oliver and finally Isobel’s revelations about her affair with Julien St. Juste.

‘I should have questioned her further, but I don’t think I’d have got anything from her at that point, and I was half in shock myself.” She pressed her hands over her lap. ‘All these months—all these years. I see her practically every day, and I never guessed something was amiss with her marriage.”

“I see you every day, and I never guessed you were a French agent.”

“Yes, but—“

‘It offends your professional pride that a rank amateur could practice deception so skillfully?”

“No, of course not. Yes, I suppose so. A bit.” She stared at him, the angles of her face sharpened by the candlelight. “You don’t seem as surprised as I am.”

“If I hadn’t already realized that few people are what they seem on the surface, you certainly opened my eyes.”

“Don’t tell me you knew—“

“That Isobel was having an affair with Julien St. Juste? Good God, no. That her and Oliver’s marriage was less than idyllic? Most marriages are.’

“When I first met them— They seemed so complete. You know, darling, I have the most beastly sense I didn’t want to see anything wrong between them. I wanted to believe marriage could be as simple and comfortable as theirs seemed. Don’t look at me like that, Charles, you know I love you but even the wildest optimist couldn’t call our marriage simple and there certainly as times it isn’t comfortable.”

“There’s a lot to be said for complexity and—“

“Discomfort?”

“I was going to say ‘challenge.’”

She gave a faint smile. ‘Does Oliver have mistresses?”

“I’ve never asked him, and he’s never confided in me. But I confess I’ve wondered. He’s always been flirtatious.”

“Why the devil didn’t you—“

“Do something? It’s not my business to interfere in other people’s lives. Say something? I didn’t know anything for a fact. I don’t think you and I’ve ever had a conversation about Isobel and Oliver’s marriage.”

“Because I never thought there was anything to discuss. I can’t believe—“

“That I saw something you didn’t?”

“I— Damn it, yes.”

He looked into the baffled gaze of his wife, the clear-eyed, unromantic realist who had entered into their own marriage for the most calculated of reasons. In theory. “Perhaps it’s a question of expectations. I don’t assume the fact that people appear content means they’re happy with their lot.”

“And you think I do? For God’s sake, Charles.”

“I think you’ve always been better able to believe in the possibility of happiness than I am.”

‘But surely when they first married—’

‘They intended to be faithful? You didn’t intend to be faithful when you married me.’

She regarded him with that scouring honesty with which she confronted uncomfortable questions. “No, I didn’t. But then I’d never hold my own behavior up as a model of anything.” She smoothed a crease from her skirt. “Did you? Intend to be faithful?”

“Yes, as it happens. But it was hardly as though I had a very active career to abandon.”

“And you take your promises seriously.” In the warm wash of candlelight, Mélanie’s gaze had the bruised look he remembered from last night. “Fidelity hasn’t been a word in my vocabulary for a long time. It might have been once. When I was a girl playing Juliet in my father’s theatre company. Before—”

“Everything else.” Before she’d been raped by a gang of British soldiers, seen her father and sister killed, been left penniless and homeless.

“Being raped was the least of it,” she said, in the low, rough voice he’d learned to recognize from moments when she dredged up long-buried truths. “I could have got past that, I think. It was losing everyone I cared about, fighting for survival. I had to claw my way back to a sense of purpose. When I did, so much I’d used to value didn’t make sense anymore.’

“There’s more than one kind of fidelity, Mel. You’ve been remarkably faithful to a number of things.”

Her gaze fastened on his face. “Charles, you know that I—“

He looked into the scarred, beautiful eyes from which he’d never been able to hide things. He found he didn’t want a declaration based on duty or guilt. “I know you,” he said. He spread his hands over the cool damask of the chair back. ‘The pertinent fact for the moment is that Bel’s lover was Julien St. Juste.”

Something flashed in Mélanie’s gaze, but she merely said, ‘Which brings us back to what St. Juste was doing in England.’

‘Quite. Of course, it’s always possible that whoever killed him didn’t have the least idea of his real identity.’

The candlelight seemed to jump in Mélanie’s eyes. “Charles—“

“You needn’t coddle me. I can handle suspecting my friends.”

‘They’re my friends too.’

He stared into the unlit fireplace, remembering the moment Mélanie had told him she was a French spy, remembering how close to violence he’d been. “Oliver has a temper. And he’s handy with his fives and a skilled fencer. Not a match for a trained assassin, but—“

“If something happened to give him an edge, if he was angry enough—”

“Whatever one’s own behavior, one’s spouse’s infidelity can be difficult to accept.”

She shot a sharp look at him. “So can learning a man has seduced one’s daughter. Or sister.”

“Yes. It gives Carfax and David motives as well. And then there’s Isobel.”

“You mean if she and St. Juste quarreled? Or she feared he’d reveal the truth to Oliver?”

“Or she learned who he was. She was remarkably cool-headed last night for a woman’s who’s just seen her lover’s corpse.”

‘Charles, we’re talking about Bel.’

‘So we are. I’m endeavoring to be detached. If—’

A rap on the library door cut his words short. ‘Lord Worlsey and Lady Lucinda,’ Michael announced.

David strode into the room, his mouth compressed into a hard line. Charles had known that look from their days at Harrow when David was trying to hold strong emotion at bay. Lucinda walked with quick, jerky steps at her brother’s side.

‘I’m sorry.” David looked from Charles to Mélanie. ‘But Lucy overheard something that I think you should hear.’

Lucinda tugged off her brown velvet bonnet. ‘I wasn’t eavesdropping. That is, not on purpose—’

‘Of course not.” Mélanie drew her to the sofa.

‘I couldn’t work out what I should do. So I went to David, and he said—’ Lucinda cast an anxious glance at her brother. David nodded. ‘Bel was with Mama this afternoon.’ Lucinda pulled off her gloves and bunched them up in her lap. ‘I was sitting with them, when Rufus—Mama’s pug—got out of boudoir. I chased him into the library. The study door must have been ajar, because that’s when I heard them.’

‘Them?’ Charles pressed a glass of sherry into her hand.

‘Papa and— I’m not sure who the other man was. It was harder to make out his voice.” Lucinda looked up at Charles, took a quick gulp of sherry, lifted her gaze to Charles again. ‘Papa was saying that it was important to keep an eye on you. I mean on Charles Fraser.’

Charles turned from handing a sherry to David. ‘You heard my name?’

‘Oh, yes. I head Papa say ‘I want Fraser watched. I need to know what he discovers. Preferably before he discovers it himself.”

A dozen quarrels with his former spymaster shot through Charles’s mind. Along with the memory of a warm clasp on the shoulder. ‘And?’ he asked.

‘I couldn’t hear all the words, but I think the other man asked why Papa asked you—you, Charles, that is—to investigate in the first place. Papa said it was unavoidable. And then—” She flushed.

‘I don’t bruise easily,’ Charles said.

‘Papa said, ‘Fraser can prove useful. Provided one keeps him under control.’ The other man murmured something about ‘Tired of doing your dirty work.”

Charles dropped into a chair opposite her. ‘I see.’

‘I was so shocked when I first heard them that I couldn’t move for a bit. Then—well yes, I was trying to hear more so I could make sense of it. Only Rufus started to squirm—I was holding him—so I had to go back upstairs.’

Mélanie squeezed Lucinda’s hand. Lucinda looked from Charles to her brother. ‘I couldn’t talk to Bel in front of Mama, and anyway it was really David’s advice I wanted, so I slipped out and walked round to the Albany. But Marston told me David had gone to Bel’s, so I walked to St. James’s Place and found him there. He said we needed to tell you.’

‘That was brave of you, Lucy,’ Charles said.

Lucinda stared at the creased ball she’d made of her doeskin gloves. ‘I know you, Charles. I know you wouldn’t— Of course, I know Papa too. That is I should. But—’

‘Knowing one’s parents can be difficult. And your father’s been gone much of the time.’

Lucinda gave a jerky nod, fingers twisting round the sherry glass.

David touched his sister on the shoulder. ‘Lucy, perhaps you’d like to go up and see Colin and Jessica?’

‘You want to talk to Charles and Mélanie alone?’

‘I’m afraid I should.’

‘I understand.” Lucinda’s gaze swept the three of them. ‘There’s an explanation, isn’t there?’

‘I’m sure there is,’ Charles said.

‘But not necessarily a comfortable one.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Charles agreed.

Lucinda picked up her bonnet and smoothed out her gloves. ‘Thank you for being honest”

David stared at the door as it closed behind his sister, then turned to Charles. ‘You don’t seem surprised.’

‘Your father trying to manipulate me isn’t exactly cause for shock,’ Charles said, swallowing the acrid taste at the back of his mouth. ‘He sees all his agents at chess pieces. Any good spymaster would.’

‘But why did he ask you to investigate at all?’ Mélanie asked.

‘He probably realized Castlereagh would suggest it if he didn’t himself. Besides, from what Lucinda overheard he seems to think I can be useful uncovering information.’

‘Just not all of it,’ David said.

‘St. Juste had worked for your father. Carfax may be afraid of what I might replace in St. Juste’s papers. The most routine spy mission is bound to have its unsavory side. I learned that before I’d worked for your father a year.’

‘That’s what doesn’t make sense,’ Mélanie said.

‘Darling?’

‘Carfax must know you’re a realist about the spy game. So what was he afraid of you discovering?’

‘Quite. I think was more personal.” David stared at his sherry glass, then crossed to the drinks trolley and splashed whisky into a fresh glass. ‘I think Father was afraid you’d learn about St. Juste and Bel.’

The words hung in the air like a pistol shot. In twenty-some years of shared confidences, Charles had never heard quite that edge in David’s voice. ‘How long have you known?’ he asked.

David tossed back a long draught of whisky. ‘I got to St. James’s Place just after Mélanie left. Bel told me. She said the truth was bound to come out now, and she rather I heard it from her.” His fingers whitened round the glass. “Damn him.”

“St. Juste?” Mélanie asked.

“Oliver.”

Mélanie went to him and laid her hand on his arm. “She’s obviously been dreadfully unhappy. I’ve been kicking myself for not noticing. But it’s folly to apportion blame when we can only observe the situation from the outside.”

“She’s my sister.” David jerked away from her grip. “I know enough to know she’d never have done this if Oliver hadn’t driven her beyond endurance. I would have asked her more, but she didn’t want to talk beyond the bare details, and then Lucinda arrived.” He took a turn about the room. ‘If Father had learned of the affair—’

‘It’s possible,’ Charles said. ‘Talleyrand had got wind of it in France. At least that’s what the Comte de Flahaut says. Flahaut was trying to follow St. Juste.’

David stopped and stared at him. ‘Good God, how many people knew about my sister’s indiscretion?’

‘Surely if Lord Carfax knew about the affair,’ Mélanie said, ‘he’d be more likely to trust Charles with Bel’s secrets than this nameless man Lucinda overheard him with.’

‘That depends on who the nameless man was.” Charles kept his gaze on David. ‘And perhaps on exactly what Carfax knew about the affair.’

David returned his gaze. ‘You think Father killed St. Juste.’

‘I don’t think it likely, but this does give him a motive.’

‘And Oliver. And me.’

‘You don’t have the temperament of a killer, David.’

‘You’re always saying you never the lengths to which people will go in the right circumstances.” David pressed his hand over his eyes. ‘Why? Why would St. Juste seduce Bel? She’s closer to Father than any of us, but I’d stake my life he doesn’t confide state secrets to her.’

‘St. Juste may have thought he could use the affair as leverage against Carfax.’

‘God in heaven.’

Charles moved to the table and picked the papers he’d brought back from Rosemary Lane. ‘Roth and I found St. Juste’s lodgings today. We surprised someone in the act of searching.’

‘You think that person was sent by my father?’

‘It would make sense.’

Mélanie moved to stand beside Charles and studied the coded papers. ‘You’ve tried to break these?’

‘I’m almost positive they’re book codes. I brought the books we found in St. Juste’s rooms, but I doubt he’d have left the code book so conveniently to hand.’

‘Did you replace anything else in his rooms?’

“Some bags of powders I suspect are poisons. And this, though I’m not sure what to make of it.” Charles pulled the glued together sheet and St. Juste’s decoded version from his coat. ‘Roth and I wondered if they could be drop dates.’

David joined them at the table. “’Lancaster, 3 November’,” he read. “That’s the date of the protest meeting that turned into a demonstration.”

“The exact date?” Charles asked.

“I’m sure of it. Will Gordon got himself in a bit of trouble and I had to go up to Lancaster and speak to the magistrate to get him released from jail. Don’t you remember? Simon and I were dining with you when we got word about it two days later. Mélanie was saying that she still didn’t understand Guy Fawkes Night when the footman came in with the message.’

Charles nodded. The exact date had been lost in the chaos of Colin’s abduction soon after, but he well remembered Simon’s frown and muttered curse on scanning the note about Will Gordon. Will was a young actor at the Tavistock, devoted to Radical causes with the intensity and fearlessness of the very young.

Mélanie was scanning the other dates. “’Long Eaton, 11 November’. Wasn’t there a fire in a factory at Long Eaton?”

“A textile mill,” Charles said. “I don’t know the exact date, but it was in November.”

“The 11^th,” David was staring down at the paper, an odd look on his face. “Some of the Tavistock company were performing there. Will went to join them after I got him released from Lancaster jail.”

“And there was Luddite activity round Rochdale last December,” Mélanie said, looking at yet another entry. She turned to David whose face had darkened. “David—“

“Ned Blakeney’s from there. Another of the actors. Yes, he and Will are friends.”

“Has Will been to visit him in Rochdale?”

“I’m not sure.”

‘Will almost always wears spectacles when he isn’t on stage, doesn’t he?’ Mélanie said. She shot Charles a look. Sam Lucan’s description of the man he’d seen in the tavern with Raoul O’Roarke hung between them. Longish dark hair and spectacles. Charles could see Will lounging on sofa in the Tavistock’s green room, dark hair hanging almost to his shoulders, spectacles propped on the bridge of his nose.

‘Are you saying you think Father was right and St. Juste was employed by English Radicals?’ David asked, oblivious to the significance of the spectacles. ‘Are you suggesting Will might have been working with him?”

Mélanie ran her fingers over the glued-together paper. ‘St. Juste decoded this. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense if he’s behind the incidents.’

‘Unless the list was put together by someone trying to uncover what was behind the incidents rather than the person who orchestrated them,’ Charles said. ‘Assuming they were orchestrated. Assuming the list means what we suspect. In any case, it’s worthwhile talking to Will.’

‘He won’t be performing tonight,’ David said. ‘The new play doesn’t open for another fortnight.’

‘No, but it’s Friday.” Charles exchanged a look with Mélanie. ‘He’ll be at the Bartletts’.”

Oliver Lydgate leaned his head against the silk damask upholstery of the wing-back chair in his wife’s boudoir. The fabric was cool and soft, like the touch of Isobel’s fingers. He closed his eyes and breathed in the lavender with which she lined her wardrobe and chest of drawers and the violet of the toilet water in the crystal bottles on her satinwood dressing table.

He sat thus in the dark, the heat of the fire lapping at the coldness inside him, until the door eased open.

He fixed his gaze fixed on the leaping flames behind the Chinese firescreen. “You’re earlier than I expected.”

‘Mama retired to bed as soon as we finished dinner. Lucy’s out somewhere with David.” He heard the stir of Isobel’s skirts round her long legs. “Oliver—’

“Billy accused Rose of eating more than her share of the trifle and Rose threw a currant at him. Amelia said she was glad she didn’t have to eat in public with them. She sounds more like you every day.”

“You ate dinner in the nursery.”

“It seemed a good idea. They were all a bit ragged round the edges.”

“I tried to explain when I saw them this afternoon.”

“I don’t think my only role in the nursery is to fill in when you can’t be there.”

“No of course not. I didn’t mean—” She swept into view. She still wore the black pelisse trimmed with jet velvet. The ensemble of a grieving widow. ‘I’m sure you want to talk.’

He watched the glow of firelight brighten the pale green mountains painted on the firescreen. A magical kingdom of impossible dreams. “It’s not really surprising. We discussed it very frankly when we became betrothed. Only the subject was my potential lapses of conduct, not yours. But I suppose it’s only fair to assume the same rules apply to both of us.’

Isobel looked down at him. The firelight struck sparks from her uncovered hair. ‘How long have you known?’

‘Did you really think I wouldn’t notice such a change in the woman I live with?”

“’Live’ is a difficult word to define, Oliver. We occupy the same house.”

“I know you. In every sense of the word, I might add. I don’t know that I could ever claim you were mine, but whatever part of you I had a claim to is less mine than it once was.”

“Oliver—“

“I’m endeavoring to be mature about it. Now. I’m afraid I wasn’t so self-possessed at first. I even went so far as to hire someone to follow you.”

“Dear God.”

He curled his fingers round the cold, expensive silk of the chair arms. “Not the way Mallinsons do things, but then I’m not a Mallinson.”

“You hired someone to hop in and out of hackneys, skulk in doorways— For God’s sake, Oliver. How—“

“Humiliating? If it’s any comfort I think I was more humiliated than you.”

“Why didn’t you—“

“Ask you? I suppose because a part of me hoped it wasn’t true.”

Isobel moved away from the fire and began to unclasp her pelisse. “It isn’t anything to do with you.”

“Do you know, I actually believe that. Nothing between us has been anything to do with me for a long time.”

She snapped open another clasp. “I’ve never embarrassed you publicly. I hope I never will.”

“My thanks, madam.”

She laid the pelisse over the sofa, smoothing the fabric. “Did you know he’d be at the ball last night?”

“How could I? I didn’t know who he was. But I couldn’t help but suspect he’d be there.”

She stared at him for a long moment. Her dove-colored gown fell in cool, classical folds about her. Athena. Or perhaps Diana. Charles would know the appropriate allusion. “Ah, now it comes,” he said. “You wonder if I killed him?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“It’s what Mélanie wondered. I could see it in her eyes. I have an excellent motive. So do you, I suppose, depending on how the affair had progressed. How had it, by the way?”

“That’s none—“

“Of my business? Perhaps not at first, but once your lover met his death in our house, I’m afraid I became inextricably involved.”

Isobel dropped down on the sofa. “I can understand you’d have been surprised. I never gave you cause to believe I’d behave in such a way. I never meant to behave in such a way. I hope you believe that at least.”

“For what it’s worth, yes.”

“Thank you.” She put her hand to her head, dislodging a thick, straight lock of hair. She looked younger, more like the girl he’d tried to propose to in the Carfax House conservatory. “I’m afraid I’m woefully lacking at skill in such matters. Perhaps I should have asked Emily Cowper for advice. Should I have dropped you a tactful hint about the matter? But then you’ve never dropped me such hints.”

He tilted his head back and looked straight into her eyes. They looked very blue just now. “Perhaps I would have done if I’d had anything to drop hints about.”

“I may not be completely up to snuff, Oliver, but I’m not stupid. It’s all right. I gave you leave.”

“Without my ever asking for it. Very kind of you, though it was a bit lowering to be forgiven for misbehavior I hadn’t even contemplated.”

Her chin jerked up.

“Did you really think I wasn’t capable of keeping my promises?” he said.

“You were in love with someone else.”

“I had been in love with someone who had since married another man. Do you think when Sylvie chose St. Ives over me I clung to her skirts like her lap dog?”

“Not any more than I believe you stopped loving her simply because you weren’t able to make her your wife.”

“Fair enough. I’ll always care for Sylvie in some way. But I was never her lover. Not in the carnal sense.”

“Not for want of wanting.”

“That doesn’t change the promises I made to you.”

“Which were?”

“Along the lines of to have and to hold, to love and to cherish as I recall. And something about worshipping you with my body. Forsaking all others.”

“You can’t expect me to believe—“

“What?” He flung the question out like a glove thrown in challenge. “Who?”

“You have a half dozen pretty women clustered about you at every entertainment we attend. You can scarcely cross a room without flirting.”

“It doesn’t—“

“Have anything to do with me?”

“Flirtation isn’t the same as taking a lover. I’ve never done that.” The need for her to understand was a sort of primal tug he could not explain. “Believe me, Bel.”

“If that’s true why the devil didn’t you ever—“

“Say so? ‘I know you think I’m a rutting bastard, wife, but I’m actually trying to be a faithful husband.’ I never thought that was the sort of thing that needed to be said.”

“I never asked you to—“

“I know. But I thought the least I could do was take the marriage as seriously as you did. As I thought you did.”

She passed a hand over her face and rubbed her temples. “A year ago—even last summer—that would have meant a great deal to me. Now— It makes my criminal conversation more of a crime. But I’m not sure it really changes anything.”

“Because you’re still in love with him?”

“Because it doesn’t change the nature of the bargain we made. You know why you offered for me.”

“Do I?”

“We both needed something and we got it from each other. It wasn’t love or even fidelity.”

“Quite true. In that sense you’ve kept your bargain to perfection.” He watched her for a moment. In the lamplight, her skin had the sheen of marble. “It must have been hard for you last night. Seeing him.”

“Yes.” She got to her feet. “To own the truth, I still can’t quite believe it.”

‘I lied for you,” Oliver said.

She turned to look down at him.

“I told Mélanie I was watching you last night. Which was true. But I said I never lost sight of you. That you didn’t leave the ballroom until after the murder was discovered.”

Isobel continued to stare at him with a glassy gaze.

“That isn’t true, of course,” Oliver continued, “as you well know. Despite my best efforts I lost sight of you for a good twenty minutes and I’m quite certain you weren’t in the ballroom.” He looked up at her for a long moment, more than long enough to stab a knife through the chest of a trusting beloved. “The question is where were you?”