Secrets of a Lady (24 page)

“So do I.” Charles had more than once marveled at the difference between his own marriage, born of exigency, and the passionless union that had resulted from his brother’s love match. Any such comparison had the bite of irony now, though whatever else could be said of his marriage to Mélanie, it could not be called passionless.

The silence was punctuated by the familiar rustle of Mélanie plucking at the skirt of her pelisse. After a moment she said, “Have you ever been to the Gilded Lily?”

“Don’t be stupid, Mel. I’ve been a married man since I came back to Britain.” In fact, his experience of brothels was limited to one visit in his Oxford days, which he had spent cooling his heels in the sitting room. Intimacy was difficult enough for him. He could never bring himself to pay for the substitute. But he was not about to go into that with the woman seated beside him, the woman with whom he had shared such intimacy that she almost might have coined him and from whom he had received nothing but lies in return.

“Then it’s a lucky thing I have some experience to go on.” Mélanie’s voice was bright as cut glass. “Some brothels have a staff of girls to service clients. Some merely provide rooms to be used by courtesans and actresses, and even respectable married women who wish to meet their lovers. Some do both. I imagine the Gilded Lily is that sort. I shouldn’t think it likely we’ll meet any of your friends there, but some of the most discriminating gentlemen find a certain piquancy in going slumming. Or so I’ve been given to understand.”

Her words brought the rest of her morning’s revelations back to him. In the deluge of events, the fact that she had once been employed in a brothel had been swept aside as almost insignificant. Now he turned it over in his mind, another piece of the puzzle of the woman he had married.

The bits of information he’d gleaned during the day shifted in his head. She would have been an orphan of sixteen when Raoul O’Roarke found her in the brothel. Charles had always known she’d endured horrors before they met. What had happened to her in the brothel was probably not so very different from what he had thought she’d suffered at the hands of the French soldiers and Spanish bandits.

He stared at her, trying to see beyond the lies. “Mel—”

“What, Charles?”

What indeed?
If the memories are too painful, don’t come with me?
She’d laugh, and he needed her help.
Tell me the whole of your past?
It wasn’t the time.

She undid her pelisse at the throat and tugged off the muslin tippet at the neck of her gown. “No one will trust us if we look too fine.” She unbuttoned her gloves, then slipped off her wedding band and put it in her reticule along with the tippet.

His throat tightened with a pang that might have been anger or loss or self-loathing. He’d only seen her remove that circle of gold a handful of times since he’d placed it on her finger. He looked at her face, the sweetness about the mouth, the fresh purity in the curve of the bones. Most men of his acquaintance would be horrified by the revelation that their wives had a past, let alone that they had sold their bodies anywhere but on the Marriage Mart (save for one or two who had actually married courtesans, but that was another matter).

Charles had always claimed that whose bed a woman had shared before her marriage was no more a man’s business than it was a wife’s business to ask the same about her husband. He recalled arguing as much in an after-dinner discussion fueled by plentiful port. “It’s all very well to try to outrage us with your bohemian sensibilities, Fraser,” one of the other men present had said, staggering to the sideboard, where their host kept a chamber pot. “You’d feel differently if it was your own wife we were talking about.” And then everyone had laughed, because they all knew Mélanie and they thought Charles was the last husband in London who had to worry about his wife before or after their marriage.

It was always a challenge to have one’s principles put to the test. With a detached part of his mind—a safe corner he retreated into all too often—Charles was relieved to find that he
didn’t
feel differently when it was his own wife involved. Mélanie had never questioned his sexual past. He had no right to question hers. That she had no doubt slept with O’Roarke, not to mention God knew whom else, after their marriage was another matter entirely.

The bite of jealousy on his tongue was as unfamiliar as a draught of Blue Ruin after years of the smoothest whisky. Mélanie might tease him for his naïveté, but he knew the games many of their friends indulged in. He’d more than once wandered onto the terrace during a ball to hear a cry or a soft murmur from the shrubbery. Or stepped into a darkened antechamber only to have to withdraw with an averted gaze and a muttered apology. At those same entertainments he’d watched his wife glide about the room in a whisper of velvet, a rustle of silk, a stir of dark ringlets, exerting her charms with disarming insouciance and devastating accuracy. He’d been idiotically sure of her. What they had between them was too rich, too complex, too multilayered for her to risk it for transitory pleasure, any more than he would. Or so he had thought. But now he faced the fact that what he and Mélanie had was built on lies, while she and O’Roarke shared a past that was every bit as textured and complex as what he once thought they had had between them.

The memory of their wedding night thundered in his head. Every moment of it was etched in his memory. She’d looked at him with such perfect trust. Or so it had seemed. It had all been lies, that wordless vocabulary of touch they had constructed between them. Christ, she must have been laughing at him inwardly. Perhaps she had laughed about it later. Perhaps she’d told O’Roarke—

He slammed his fist into the leather of the carriage seat. Damn her. She had tricked him into doing the one thing he had strenuously avoided since childhood. Baring his soul.

It was still raining when they pulled up in Villiers Street. Through the rain-streaked window Charles saw a faded sign, swinging wildly in the wind, bearing a painting of a lily in peeling gilt and beneath it a picture of a coffeepot, held in a beringed, lace-cuffed hand. He might not be experienced in such matters, but he knew the latter indicated a coffeehouse that doubled as a brothel.

The smell of damp and rot was thick in the air. He considered asking the hackney driver to wait for them but decided against it. It might draw undue attention, and in any case he wasn’t sure the driver would comply. He handed his wife from the hackney and followed her into a piece of her past.

Chapter 16

T
he smell hit Mélanie like a fist in the face as she stepped over the threshold. Tobacco and sweat, cheap scent and cheaper liquor. And a sweet, cloying muskiness, a never-forgotten odor that took her back to hot hands and probing fingers, coarse linen sheets and groaning straw-filled mattresses and soul-destroying despair.

The tin lamps swayed with the opening of the door. The light jumped and wavered over the peeling walls, the stained tables, the rouged, sweating faces, lending a hellish aspect to an already hellish scene. She forced herself to note her surroundings, to anchor herself to the present. Smoke-blackened walls, floorboards that didn’t appear to have been swept in a fortnight, bright, gaudy dresses, brightly colored hair. Her own hair had been hennaed once, until one of the older women had pointed out that her natural coloring was more dramatic.

She turned to Charles and pressed her face into his shoulder. “Put your arm round me,” she whispered against his collar. “We need to look as though we belong.”

He hesitated only a fraction of a second before he draped his arm across her shoulders. She leaned into him, not with wifely, shoulder-brushing intimacy, but with a blatant, clinging sensuality.

Most of the customers were too absorbed in bottles, dice, and partners to take much notice of them, but as they moved past the brick fireplace, a hand shot out and gripped her skirt. “Here now, you’re new.” The speaker had an Oxbridge accent, and judging by his pimply face and squeaky voice, he was still at university. He ran a far from inexperienced gaze over her. Then he glanced at Charles. “Wouldn’t mind having a turn when you’re done with her, old boy.”

The muscles in Charles’s arm tightened. “Watch your tongue, lad. You’ll never win a lady by talking behind her back.”

He drew her away, but she turned back and ran her finger down the side of the boy’s face. His skin was slick with oily sweat. “Sorry, love.” She made her voice lower, rougher, throatier than usual, without a trace of a Continental accent. “He’s got a hellish temper. Maybe some other time.”

Charles steered her to a table in an alcove by the fire. She removed her bonnet and pulled some tendrils of hair loose about her face. A tired-looking waiter threaded his way through the tables to their side, surveyed her as though matter-of-factly totting up her monetary value, and asked what he could do for them. Charles ordered brandy, his Scots accent roughening the Mayfair edges out of his voice, and said they were looking for a woman named Susan Trevennen.

“Trevennen?” The waiter scratched his thin, greasy hair.

Mélanie leaned one elbow on the table. “She came from Cornwall originally. She’d be about thirty. She has red hair.”

The waiter’s face cleared. “Oh, you mean Copper Sue. Wait a tick, love, I’ll send her over.”

Charles looked at Mélanie. “My compliments.”

“Practice.” She unclasped her pelisse and let it slither down on the chair round her. If she kept her arm at her side, the rent in her gown wasn’t too noticeable. The air felt clammy against her bare throat, though her gown covered far more of her than most of her evening dresses. Two men at a nearby table were staring at her, as was another from across the room. She’d forgotten how it felt to be raked with so blatant a gaze, as though you were stripped down to the sum of your body parts.

The waiter returned, plunked down two glasses of brandy, and said without embarrassment that Copper Sue was with a customer but would join them presently. Charles picked up the brandy and sniffed it. “Gin might have been safer.”

“I think any sort of safety is a rare commodity here.” She picked up the brandy and took a long swallow. It ranked several degrees lower than the liquor Charles had given her at the Marshalsea. They’d drunk raw red wine in the brothel in Léon. Sharp, sour, strong enough to blur the sharp edges of reality.

“Mel.” Charles’s hand moved across the table.

She looked from his hand into his gray eyes. The compassion in his gaze seared her. She summoned up the hard look she’d perfected at fifteen, when she needed all her defenses. “Don’t worry, darling. It’s not as if there’s much left that can shock me.”

A couple dropped down at the table next to them. Or rather the man dropped down, pulled the women into his lap, and began whispering a variety of suggestions into her ear in a voice that carried all too well. Crudeness combined with lack of imagination. A fatal mix.

Mélanie shifted her chair and transferred her gaze to the painting over the fireplace. It was smoke-darkened, but it seemed to depict Zeus, in a swan guise that was all too human, hovering over a recumbent Leda. Leda wore nothing beyond a thin strip of gauze about her waist, and Zeus was the only swan Mélanie had ever seen with an erect phallus.

Laughter drifted down the stairs, followed by an abrupt cry and the sound of a door being slammed shut. Upstairs there would be thin mattresses and stale sheets and cracked, cobweb-hung expanses of ceiling. And little one could do to control what happened once the door was closed and the money on the table.

At the center of the room, a woman with bright gold hair and a low-cut red dress started singing a bawdy song that was vaguely recognizable as a variant on “Là ci darem la mano.” The undergraduate who had pawed Mélanie had pulled a fair-haired child who couldn’t be more than fourteen onto his lap and was undoing the strings on her bodice.

“You wanted to see me?” A hard-eyed woman with hair the color of a copper skillet materialized out of the crowd and stood before their table.

Charles got to his feet. “Miss Trevennen?”

She laughed, a sound as harsh as the taste of the Gilded Lily’s brandy. Her teeth were yellow and she was missing two of them. “It’s a long time since anyone’s called me that. Quite a novelty. Yes, that’s me. What do you want?” Her gaze slid from Charles to Mélanie. “I don’t do threesomes.”

Charles didn’t so much as blink. “It’s about your sister.”

“Helen?” A spark flashed in Susan Trevennen’s eyes, like the glint of a knife blade. “She hasn’t managed to get herself killed, has she? That’s just about the only good news you could bring me about my bitch of a sister.”

Susan could only be a few years Mélanie’s senior, but beneath the layers of cheap powder and greasy rouge, her face was splotched and marked by deep furrows. A mark that might be a bruise showed beneath her left eye, but it was her eyes themselves that resonated for Mélanie. The wariness, the instinctive calculation, the knowledge that everyone wanted to use you one way or another and the only way to survive was to use him or her first. Her own eyes, Mélanie knew, had had that same look before her sixteenth birthday. It had taken all Raoul’s training and all his patience in other ways to get rid of it.

“Your sister isn’t dead, Miss Trevennen,” Charles said. “At least not as far as we know.”

“Nell always had the most godawful knack for self-preservation.” Susan pushed limp strands of dyed red hair off her face. Beads of sweat had clotted the powder against her skin. “Why did she send you here?”

“She didn’t send us,” Charles said. “We’re trying to find her.”

Susan Trevennen gave a bark of dry laughter. “If you’re looking for Nell, I’m the last person you should be talking to.”

“You’re just about the last person we’ve tried.” Charles pulled out one of the rickety ladderback chairs at the table. “Won’t you sit down, Miss Trevennen?” The Scots accent had faded again. It was his drawing room voice, the sort of voice Susan Trevennen must have been accustomed to as a girl in her father’s vicarage.