Beneath a Silent Moon (64 page)

Charles nodded, still without looking at her. "She was scarcely more than a girl."

"Not in the end. She was a woman, forced to make hard and desperate choices. But she did choose."

"It's a damned bloody waste. Both her and Honoria." He swallowed. The candlelight shot through the linen of his shirt and picked out the pulse beating just above his collarbone. "I wasn't in love with Honoria," he said a low voice. "But I loved her. She was my friend. She was beautiful, yes, and of course there were times when I couldn't help but notice it. But that wasn't the sum of it. That wasn't even the most important part. Why does every relation between a man and a woman have to come down to the carnal?"

"Perhaps because that's the easiest for people to understand."

"A sad commentary on humanity. I don't think David's ever been remotely close to being in love with me. Why should everyone assume that I could only care about Honoria if I was in love with her?"

"Difficulty looking beyond the obvious. I was the worst offender of all." Mélanie found herself staring at the gold circle of her wedding band. She'd cast Charles's relationship to Miss Talbot in terms of romance and desire from the moment she overheard them in the library at the Glenister House ball. "I was jealous." She let the word linger in the air with all its implications. "But of all the sorts of intimacy, perhaps what happens between two people in bed was the one I had the least cause to be jealous of."

She looked at her husband. Charles's gaze was as unreadable as the Elsinore League's codes. "In the end I scarcely knew Honoria," he said. "You can't be jealous of an intimacy I shared with a woman who was a stranger to me."

"I can be jealous of what you shared with the woman you thought she was." Mélanie gripped the hard gold of her wedding ring. "You and Miss Talbot came from the same world. Whatever your feelings for her, you could scarcely avoid imagining the sort of life you might have had with her."

Self-mocking laughter glinted in her husband's eyes. "Christ, Mel, you've read the way my Parliamentary speeches are received in the press. I don't belong in the world I was bom into. I never have. If I'd married Honoria she'd have wanted to see me Prime Minister or at the very least Foreign Secretary. We saw the world in different ways. I understood that even before I learned—everything we've learned about her. I'm not even sure who she was anymore. I don't think I'll ever understand how she could play dice with other people's lives. And yet—I can't believe she couldn't have been more than what we've learned these past days."

Mélanie felt something twist in her chest that might have been regret or fear. Or guilt. "That's the wonderful thing about you, Charles. You always think people can be better than they are."

Charles stared at his hand where it gripped the mantel. "I'm glad Quen's going to marry Miss Newland. Perhaps Andrew and Gelly will be able to salvage something from the wreckage."

"I hope so."

"Odd how we latch onto marriage as the only sort of happy ending to balance the scale."

Mélanie's nails scraped against her jaconet skirt. "I suppose it's some sort of affirmation of hope for the future. If one does it for the right reasons."

"Assuming one knows what those are." He dug his fingers into his hair, his gaze still fixed away from her. "Suppose Hamlet had married Ophelia, instead of trying to send her off to safety in a nunnery. Would he have been impossibly selfish?"

Her fingers tightened, snagging a thread. She didn't pretend to surprise at his change of subject. It wasn't really a change at all. "I'm quite sure that if Ophelia had been raped and left pregnant, Hamlet would have offered her marriage to protect her. That wouldn't have been selfish. That would have been heroic."

"Would he have made her happy?"

"I suspect in a few years she wouldn't have been able to imagine life without him." She swallowed, pushing air and words past the tightness in her throat. "Better to ask, would she have made him happy? And would he ever have been able to believe he had any right to be happy?"

Charles stared at his fingers spread on the golden oak of the mantel. Without any change in inflection, he said, "I tried to kill myself once."

She couldn't control her intake of breath. Other than that, she sat absolutely still.

"After my mother died," he continued. "After she put a bullet through her head. Not immediately after. I went through the motions of finishing up at Oxford. By that time, I knew I'd lost my brother as well. That we'd never be the friends we'd been, though I didn't understand why. I still don't. And I realized my father would never—not that I ever thought he would. Or I should have known better than to think it. And I didn't begin to understand what Gisèle needed from me. Not then. Perhaps if I had—" He shook his head. "I don't know what triggered it, what sent me over the edge. Why I was suddenly standing in my rooms in the Albany, trying to slash my wrists. Not very effectively."

"Thank God for once there was something you didn't have a talent for."

He gave a faint smile. "David found me. He and Simon wouldn't let me out of their sight for a fortnight. David got his father to arrange my post at the embassy in Lisbon. I let him bundle me off. I let him connive at my running away."

"He probably saved your life."

"Perhaps. If I'd been stronger—Gelly needed me. I should at least have tried to explain to her. The Dunmykel tenants needed a voice raised on their behalf, not an absentee heir across the sea. Running away may have given me a respite, but it didn't solve anything."

It had led him to her and to their children, the one he had given his name to and the one they had created with their
own bodies. But she didn't say any of that. She didn't dare.

"I thought if I could learn who killed Honoria, if this time I could actually confront things instead of running—" He dropped his hand from the mantel. "But we seem to be left with a worse mess than ever." He took a turn about the hearthrug, as though it were an enclosed space. As though he wanted to break free but couldn't. "There'll be things to do. Andrew and Quen are bound to have more questions come morning. We have to decide how much to tell the others. And we need to arrange for the funeral—both funerals—Father and Evie—"

"Darling." She got to her feet. "We don't have to do any of it tonight."

He spun round to face her, his gaze raw. "I have to." The words thundered against the oak ceiling. "Because if I stop and think—"

He broke off. She waited in an eternity of silence. The tapers guttered on the mantel. The smell of beeswax drifted through the room.

"Last night, when Wheaton's men had you, I was terrified," he said.

It was the last thing she'd expected to hear. "You can be ridiculously overprotective, Charles."

"No, not that." His voice was rough, as though he were trying to pick his way through an unfamiliar tongue. "It was sheer bloody selfishness. I was terrified at the thought of losing you. I couldn't imagine—I need you, Mel."

She stared through the shadows at him, robbed of speech.

"Oh, God, Mel, I—" He took a half step toward her, and then stumbled into her arms. She held him, his head against her shoulder, his chest shuddering against her own.

He clutched her as though he was afraid she'd be wrenched from his arms. He sobbed into her hair. Sobs that bridged years and worlds, lies and deceptions, words they had never spoken and perhaps never would.

"Don't let me go."

She smoothed his hair. They didn't live in a fairy tale. They couldn't ever forget what they had both seen of the world. They could only hold each other in the face of it. "It's all right, darling. I'm here."

In the end, perhaps, that was the most anyone had.

Once again, I am indebted to the libraries at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, for their wonderful research materials. I am also indebted to the many kind people at castles, country houses, and museums (not to mention the helpful staff at hotels and restaurants) in Scotland and England for answering my endless questions and to the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which provided the inspiration for Kenneth Fraser's collection. I would not have been able to create the world Mélanie, Charles, Simon, David, Gisèle, Tommy, Quen, and the others inhabit without these invaluable resources.

The Elsinore League are fictional, as is Le Faucon de Maulévrier, though the rebellion in the Vendee, in which I have grounded Le Faucon's history, was real.

Lord Castlereagh is the only real historical personage to make an appearance in this book (though several other real people are mentioned, such as the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Bessborough, and the Lamb family). Obviously Castlereagh's involvement in the events of the novel is fictional, but I have endeavored to portray him in a manner consistent with the historical record of the complex man he was.