Secrets of a Lady (35 page)

“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 find 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 find 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?”