Secrets of a Lady (19 page)
Charles sat in the other high-backed chair. “We understand Miss Trevennen inherited her acting talent from you.”
“You could say that.” Trevennen sank into an armchair, flicking back the skirts of his coat as if it was a sweeping cloak. “My Hamlet was considered quite good. In the provinces, you know. Of course, by the time I came to London, I played supporting roles. Quite a collection of Shakespearean dukes, and Hazlitt was pleased to comment on my Jaques. ‘And so, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe,/And then from hour to hour we rot and rot,/And thereby hangs a tale.’” He frowned, as though this cut a bit too close to the bone. “Oh, you wanted to talk about Helen, didn’t you? What’s she been up to, then?”
Charles recited the story about Jennings and the legacy left to Helen Trevennen.
Trevennen listened with the detached interest of an actor hearing the plot of an amusing new play. Perhaps after so many years in the Marshalsea, everything in the outside world seemed like theatrical illusion. “Nelly. Such a pretty little girl. A wheedler from the first, mind, but even then ‘custom could not stale her infinite variety.’”
“When did you see her last?” Charles asked.
Trevennen stared out the window. The iron spikes on the outer wall of the prison were visible through the mildew-filmed glass. “Must be seven or eight years ago. She was never one for regular visits, but she used to appear every so often, usually when she wanted some sort of advice about the theater or racing. She was almost as fond of the horses as I am, though a bit less prodigal. I helped her get her position at the Drury Lane. She made a charmingly innocent Hero and I heard she did a very fetching Constance Neville in her last season. I wasn’t able to attend the performances by that time, of course. Still, I quite looked forward to her carrying on the family name. Then one day this friend of hers—charming young lady—called to say Helen had been obliged to leave London. Do you know where she took herself off to, then?”
“No,” Charles said. “We were hoping you would know, or at least have some idea.”
Trevennen blinked. “Sorry, dear boy. Always fancied myself a fair judge of women, but never could predict what Nelly would do from one moment to the next. She drove my poor brother to distraction.”
“Is your brother still living, Mr. Trevennen?” Mélanie asked.
“No, Theodore went to his maker some ten years since. He was a parson with a living in Cornwall, near Truro. Lost his wife early and hadn’t the least idea how to bring up the girls, poor fellow. He was a dreadful puritan, which only served to make them more wild, if you ask me, but of course he never did.”
Charles seized hold of the new information in this speech. “Girls?” he said.
“Nelly and Susy. You haven’t met Susan? No, no reason you should, I suppose.” Trevennen smoothed his gray-brown hair back from his high forehead, less Prospero now than Falstaff, looking back with rueful regret. “She’s two years younger than Helen. Looks quite like her, though Nelly’s a blonde and Susy got her mother’s red hair. Nelly ran off to London when she was seventeen. Susy followed a year later. My brother washed his hands of the pair of them. Never saw them again as far as I know. But he’d stopped speaking to me to all intents and purposes when I took to the stage. It was quite a surprise when Helen appeared on my doorstep and said she wanted to tread the boards herself. Tried to do what was best for her.”
“I don’t doubt it, Mr. Trevennen.” Mélanie smiled at him. “Were the girls close?”
Trevennen snorted. “Close as Hermia and Helena.”
“I see. Sewing on the same sampler one minute, ready to tear each other’s eyes out the next?”
“Exactly. Do you have sisters, Mrs. Fraser?”
“One younger sister. It can be a complicated relationship.” One would swear Mélanie was telling the truth. Perhaps, Charles realized, she actually
was
telling the truth. He knew nothing about her real family, save that her father had been an actor and had died when she was fifteen. “Susan hasn’t heard from Helen in the last seven years either?” Mélanie asked.
“Susy hasn’t mentioned Nelly at all for longer than that. They had some sort of falling-out, though neither of them saw fit to explain it to me, and I thought it best to keep well clear. They shared rooms when Susy first came to London. Nelly was at the Drury Lane and Susy was an opera dancer at the Covent Garden. Then they must have quarreled about something or other. Nelly moved to finer rooms and Susy moved to Clerkenwell and neither of them mentioned the other when they came to visit me.”
“Is Miss Susan Trevennen still in Clerkenwell?” Charles asked.
“No.” Trevennen shifted his position in the chair as though he was trying to inch away from something. Falstaff gave way to Desdemona’s deceived father. “I know nothing of Nelly’s life in recent years. What I know of Susan’s I fear has been…unfortunate. A true daughter of the game.”
Charles felt Mélanie go still at this echo of the words she had quoted about herself, but her face betrayed nothing.
Trevennen’s shoulders sank deeper into the chair. “Susan is now employed at the Gilded Lily. In Villiers Street, off the Strand.”
He seemed to think the name would not mean anything to Mélanie. Charles was fairly certain that it did, but he didn’t disabuse Trevennen.
Mélanie got to her feet with a gentle swish of her skirts. Before the men could rise, she dropped down beside Trevennen’s chair and pressed his hand. “Mr. Trevennen. Do you have any idea where Helen went?”
Trevennen looked at her with the air of a man longing to transform himself back into Hotspur or Prince Hal. His pale blue eyes filled with regret at having to disappoint her. For an instant, Charles had a sheer craftsman’s admiration for his wife’s technique. “I’m afraid not,” Trevennen said. “Knowing Nelly, she hasn’t immured herself in some backwater.”
“Did she ever mention any friends, in London or outside of it?”
“Nelly was never one to volunteer information, unless she thought it could get her something, and then the odds were it wouldn’t be truthful.”
Mélanie sat back on her heels. “Did she ever seem afraid of anything? Or anyone?”
“Nelly?” Trevennen threw back his head and gave a rich laugh that echoed off the low ceiling as though it were the rafters of the Drury Lane. “‘Of all base passions, fear is most accurs’d.’ Or so Nelly would have claimed. We Trevennens may be a foolish lot, Mrs. Fraser, but we don’t frighten easily, and Nelly had more courage than my brother and I put together.”
Charles got to his feet. “One last question, Trevennen. Has anyone else asked you about your niece recently?”
“About Nelly?” Trevennen shook his head. “Good God, no. I don’t get many visitors and I doubt most of the people here even remember I have two nieces.”
Charles nodded. “A dark-haired man with a Spanish accent was asking questions about her at the theater. I’d advise you not to talk to him. We have reason to think he doesn’t wish Miss Trevennen well.”
Trevennen squared his shoulders with the dignity of King Lear. “Don’t worry, Fraser. I don’t volunteer information to anyone I don’t care for.”
A light rain was falling when Charles and Mélanie stepped back out onto the gallery. The wind slapped against the stone, bringing a sour smell from the ground below and warning of a more violent storm to come. The gallery was crowded with visitors hurrying home and Marshalsea residents hurrying back to their rooms before the storm hit.
“I take it the Gilded Lily is a brothel,” Mélanie said. The press of the crowd forced her to walk close to Charles, but she hadn’t taken his arm.
“It is.”
“I won’t ask how you know,” she said, as they reached the head of the stairs. “Shall we try it first or—”
She got no farther. Charles, his gaze focused inward, didn’t see what actually happened. One moment Mélanie was speaking. The next, she gave an abrupt cry and fell headlong down the steps to the hard stone below.
M
élanie came to to the feel of rain falling and the brush of fingers against her face.
“Mel.” Her husband’s voice, low and urgent. She opened her eyes and looked into his own. His brows were drawn, his mouth set. He released his breath in a harsh sigh. “Can you sit up?”
“I think so.” She reached back against the rain-slick stone, then winced as a burning pain tore through her side. Charles’s arm came round her or she would have fallen backwards. She felt him stiffen, heard his quick intake of breath. “What is it?” she asked.
“You’re bleeding.” He looked up and spoke more loudly. “My wife has injured herself. I need a quiet room, warm water, bandages.”
A murmur of conversation followed. Mélanie realized a small crowd had gathered at the base of the steps where she was lying. Solicitous hands helped her to her feet. The voices kept fading in and out round her. Her vision blurred, clouded, faded to black, then returned in a burst of color that sent a stab of pain through her head.
Charles’s voice sounded in her ear. “Can you walk?”
“Yes,” she said, because it seemed ridiculous that she could not, but she swayed when she tried to take a step. In the end he half carried her across an alley, through a low doorway, and then through another into a small sitting room. She sank into a worn blue velvet wing chair before the welcome warmth of a fire. She heard Charles say he could tend to his wife himself and then deliver some instructions she couldn’t follow. Her head was spinning and her side burned and she couldn’t seem to stop shivering.
A few moments later, Charles returned carrying a tray with a steaming bowl of water, a stack of cloths, a bottle, and a glass. He dropped down beside her, splashed something into the glass, and put it in her hand. “Drink. It’ll help.”
“What is it?”
“Brandy, supposedly. I wouldn’t swear to the quality.” He cupped his hand round hers and guided the glass to her lips. It tasted as harsh as sandpaper, but its warmth spread through her, and she stopped shaking. She had a memory of him giving her whisky to drink in the Cantabrian Mountains. With that memory came another. She jerked, spilling the brandy. “Charles, we don’t have time for this.”
He put the glass on the floor. “Hold still, Mel. You can’t afford to get killed just now.” He undid the ribbons on her damp, crushed bonnet and set it on the hearth rug to dry. “Can you move your arm? I need to look at the wound.”
She lifted her right arm and gasped at the jolt of pain that ran down her side. “I can’t think what I cut myself on. Was there broken glass?”
“Someone stabbed you. We need to get your pelisse off. Lean forward and I’ll manage the fastenings.”
He unclasped her pelisse and slipped it off her shoulders, unhooked her gown and did the same. Instead of trying to pull her chemise over her head, he ripped the linen in two from shoulder to waist, which was a good thing because it hurt quite damnably to move her arm.
He wrapped a blanket round her shoulders as best he could without covering the wound, then dipped a cloth in the water and pressed it against her side. “How much do you remember?”
Her head had stopped spinning and her senses were flooding back. She could see the black smoke stains on the fireplace tiles, smell the damp and the coal smoke, hear the drip of rain on the roof. The pain was sharper, in her side and her back and her head, but her memory had sharpened as well. “I was pushed.”
“So I thought.” He took the cloth away, splashed some brandy on a fresh cloth, and dabbed at the wound. “Did you see who pushed you?”
She winced. The brandy burned as much against her side as it had down her throat. “No. All I remember is a hand on my back and then pain and falling. I didn’t realize I’d been knifed. But it couldn’t have been an accident or a robbery attempt. Whoever it was didn’t grab for my reticule and in any case it would be silly to—”
She sucked in her breath. White-hot pain closed her throat.
“Sorry,” Charles said. “Almost done.” He put the brandy glass into her free hand.
She took another long sip. “In any case, it would be silly to stab someone when all you wanted to do was steal her purse.”
“Very silly.” He pressed a clean pad of linen against her side. “Hold that, will you? No, there’s no doubt the attack was deliberate. Someone doesn’t want us to find the ring.”
She set the brandy glass on the arm of the chair and held the makeshift bandage in place with her left hand. “Iago Lorano hasn’t been to see Mr. Trevennen. You’d think he would have if he knew Helen Trevennen had an uncle in the Marshalsea.”
Charles unwound a long strip of linen and wrapped it round her chest to hold the bandage in place. “Suppose Lorano paid someone at the Drury Lane to send word to him if anyone appeared inquiring about Miss Trevennen.”
Mélanie forced her mind to focus. Her head had a tiresome tendency to throb. “And this same person overheard you direct Randall to the Marshalsea? He sent word to Lorano, Lorano rushed to the Marshalsea, lingered outside Trevennen’s rooms, and then knifed me. Or else hired someone else to do it while we were with Trevennen.” She calculated the time. “It’s possible. Just.”
Charles tied the linen into a smooth knot. “He might see it as a way to delay us while he picks up the trail of the ring himself.”
“In which case he’ll be talking to Trevennen right now.” She gripped the threadbare arms of the chair. “Charles!”
“Sit down, Mel.” He drew the ruined remnants of the chemise about her with gentle fingers. “I have a lad keeping watch on Trevennen’s rooms. He’ll let us know if Lorano appears. Though if Lorano’s got a grain of sense—which is debatable—he’ll wait until we’re out of the prison. Let’s get your dress back on before you catch a chill.”
She struggled back into the dress, or rather he pulled it back over her shoulders. “How hard is it to breathe?” he asked as he did up the hooks.
She started to draw a deep breath to prove she could do so, then thought better of it. “Not very.”
“Surely you can lie more adroitly than that. You may have cracked a rib, I couldn’t tell for sure. The wound’s long, but not too deep, and it didn’t hit anything vital.”