Secrets of a Lady (5 page)

“That’s more like it.” The woman pulled a flask from her pocket and unscrewed the top. “Drink this down, there’s a good boy.”

The flask had a funny, sickly smell. Colin stared at it. He wasn’t sure he could have managed to drink it if he wanted to, and he knew he didn’t want to.

“Don’t be balky, boy. There’s no time for it.” She grabbed him by the shoulders and tilted his head back. Pain lanced through his temples. He gave a cry that got clogged in his throat.

“Drink it,” the woman said again. She put the flask to his lips. “It won’t hurt, it’ll just make you fall asleep. Better than Jack hitting you again.”

The memory of Jack hitting him was enough. She tipped the flask, and Colin tried to swallow. The stuff tasted even more sickly than it smelled. He gagged, but he managed to choke some of it down.

“All right, that should do it.” The lady took the flask away. She laid him back down in the cart and pushed something under his head that felt like straw.

“Not a peep out of you, mind.” She laid the rough stuff—a burlap bag—on top of him but didn’t pull it over his face. “You’ll soon be asleep.”

He looked up at her. “Couldn’t I go home, please? I won’t tell anyone I saw you.”

The woman got to her feet and shook her head. “Sorry, lad. That would make a right mess of everything.”

The boards creaked. The lady must have climbed back onto the box.

“All right?” A man’s voice, low and rough, rose above the stillness. It had a funny lilt to it, sort of like Daddy’s but not quite.

“He’s had enough laudanum to put him out till we’re safe settled. I couldn’t risk you hitting him again or our job’d have been over before it was begun.”

“You told me to keep him quiet. What the hell’d you expect?” The cart lurched forward. “Anyway, what’s it matter if we get our money? You really think his high and mightiness means to hand the whelp back alive?”

“That’s his business.” The woman’s voice got louder, as though she’d turned her head. “But I’m not throwing away our prize chip just as the cards are dealt.”

“We’ve made our bargain. Five hundred pounds.”

“Why settle for five hundred when we could have two or three times that?”

The man gave a low chuckle. “Christ, Meg. You can still surprise me.”

“Why not? We’ve got the boy. We keep him till we get what we want. Then his lordship can do what he wants with the brat.”

Colin’s head was beginning to feel as though it were filled with cotton wool, but he tried to think past the fuzziness. They had
meant
to take him. It hadn’t been an accident. Someone called his lordship had paid them to take him. Mummy and Daddy knew lots of lordships. Some of them let him ride their horses and even sneaked him ices when he peered over the stair rail during parties. Some frowned when he made too much noise in the drawing room. Some ignored him. But he couldn’t think of a reason why any of them would want to steal him away from home. There was Great-Grandpapa, of course. But he would never do something so mean and anyway people called him “Your Grace” or sometimes “Duke.”

“You always know just how to handle a man, Meggie,” the man said after a moment. “One way or another.”

“Handle him?” The woman’s laugh was like the scrape of nails on a writing slate. “I’d sooner handle a snake. He’s the most dangerous man we’ve ever had dealings with, and don’t you forget it.”

“Don’t exaggerate, girl.”

“I’m not.”

“What makes him so dangerous, then?”

The lady was silent for so long that Colin didn’t think he’d be able to keep from falling asleep. When she finally spoke, it sounded as though the words were drifting down a tunnel. “Because he has nothing left to lose.”

Mélanie murmured the words of a Spanish lullaby. Jessica snuggled against her, as though she could burrow into safety. Her hand was fisted round the falling collar of Mélanie’s gown, but she was losing the fight against sleep. Berowne sat washing himself on the bed beside them.
The harmless, necessary cat
. Perhaps he knew that the sight of him smoothing his soft gray fur and rubbing his ears was the best comfort he could offer.

Mélanie’s gaze drifted over the room. Her lip-rouge-stained glass of whisky stood abandoned on the dressing table beside the rouge pots and perfume flasks and jewel boxes. Her throat closed at the sight. Little more than an hour ago, she and Charles had been laughing in this room in blithe unconcern. Little more than an hour before that she had been fending off the Marqués de Carevalo’s attentions and eating overrich lobster patties, as though this night were no different from any other.

Colin, her son, was missing, taken from his bedchamber and spirited into the dark London night. The knowledge reverberated through her with a force that bone and muscle could scarcely contain.

Logic said that whoever had taken Colin was long gone and the best way to help him was to wait for the Bow Street officers, but her body screamed with the impulse to run from the house and scour the streets of Mayfair shouting her son’s name.

Yet beneath the fear and disbelief, guilt twisted her guts. She had thought she was safe in this beautiful house, with her beautiful children and her brilliant if self-contained husband. She had thought she had put the past behind her. There were moments when she had feared otherwise, when she had known that one couldn’t separate what one had been from what one was now and what one would become. But never,
sacrebleu,
never, had she thought her children would pay for her crimes.

Jessica made a protesting sound. Mélanie willed the tension from her arms.
Was
that why Colin had been taken? Because of who his mother was? She could not make sense of it, yet the fear that it was true gnawed at her insides.

The knife’s edge on which she had balanced for so many years turned inward, slashing through elaborate layers of defense and pretense, laying bare the cold, hard fear that had always lurked at the heart of her marriage. Should she tell Charles the whole? Would the truth serve any purpose? Or would it merely smash their marriage to bits without doing Colin any good?

“Mel.” Her husband’s voice came from the doorway.

She jerked her head up. She looked into the deep-set gray eyes that could see so much and yet from which she had kept her deepest secrets hidden for seven years. For a moment, she doubted her own ability to dissemble.

“The Bow Street officers are here,” Charles said. “They’ve gone outside to look at the garden. They made it clear I wasn’t to get in the way. Since I’d already drawn my own conclusions, I left them to see if they come up with anything different.” His mouth hardened, and she could feel the need for action rippling through him. He walked toward the bed. “Jessica asleep?”

She was, Mélanie realized. Her head had flopped against Mélanie’s arm, and her breathing was deep and even. “At last. I think she should stay in here. The Bow Street men will want to go through the nursery rooms.”

Charles turned back the covers. Mélanie uncurled Jessica’s fingers from the collar of her gown and laid her on the Irish linen sheet. Jessica stirred but didn’t open her eyes.

Mélanie straightened up to find Charles looking down at their daughter, his face knit in a fierce combination of love and fear and rage. She touched his arm. “She was asking for Colin. She knows something’s wrong. We’ll have to find a way to explain.”

He nodded, the muscles in his arm bunched tight beneath her fingers. She studied his face. His hair was damp and he had got a smudge of soot on his cheek, marks of the investigating he had done himself while they waited for Bow Street. “What conclusions did you draw?” she said.

He lifted his gaze to her. “I couldn’t find anything outside, except the footprints in the primrose bed. There were two of them. One man’s feet are longer by a good two inches. Inside—they definitely climbed in through the window, but it looks as though they left by way of the kitchen.”

Mélanie started. “But the scrap of fabric on the windowsill—”

“Doesn’t match Colin’s nightshirts. I compared it to one in his wardrobe. The scrap must have come from one of the thieves’ shirts. I found a faint scrape of dirt on the carpet in the corridor and more on the back stairs.”

“You mean they climbed in through Colin’s window and then carried him down to the kitchen?”

“I think it’s more likely Colin went downstairs on his own.”

“Of course,” she said. “Midnight hunger pangs.”

“Quite. When the thieves didn’t find him in his room, they guessed the kitchen was the likeliest place to look. They found him there and went out through the kitchen door into the garden.”

The image flickered before Mélanie’s eyes with the blinding pain of sunlight striking snow-covered ground.

Berowne stirred on the coverlet, stretching a paw toward them. Charles reached down to give the cat an absent pet. “I told the Bow Street Runner—Roth is his name—that we’d be in the small salon.”

“Then we should go down.” Mélanie rubbed at the smudge on his face. “I’ll ask Laura to sit with Jessica.”

He caught her hand and pressed it to his lips. Mélanie took a deep breath, gathering her forces for the interview with the Bow Street Runner. Questions had to be asked. God knew questions needed to be asked.

How they were to be answered was another matter entirely.

Chapter 3

J
eremy Roth, runner in the employ of the Bow Street Public Office, stepped through a swan-pedimented doorway into an airy room with sea-green walls and pristine ivory moldings. The small salon, the footman had called it. You could fit two of his own parlor quite neatly beneath the coffered ceiling and not even scrape the paint.

The Frasers were standing in front of the veined cream marble fireplace, flanked by matched silver candlesticks, the porcelain mantel clock between them. Mélanie Fraser had her back to the door, her dark head held at a proud angle, the pin-tucked skirt of her pale blue gown falling in perfect folds round her. Charles Fraser had one hand on his wife’s shoulder, the other on the mantel, his claret-colored coat an unexpected jolt of color among the cool tones of the room.

They could have been posing for a portrait of a typical Mayfair couple, at home in their perfect jewel box of a world. Save that this was an hour when no fashionable couple would be awake. Unless, of course, they had failed to go to bed, in which case they would probably not be in each other’s company.

Charles Fraser lifted his gaze to the doorway. “Oh, Roth, good. Come in.” The rough Scottish lilt in his voice was more pronounced than it had been when Roth arrived. Otherwise he sounded perfectly in command of himself. Roth marveled, as he had on his arrival, at Fraser’s composure. The result of training from the cradle, no doubt. In his place, Roth would have been tearing his hair out and smashing things.

“You haven’t met my wife,” Fraser said, as Roth advanced into the room.

“Mrs. Fraser.” Roth inclined his head, then felt the breath catch unexpectedly in his throat. He had heard Mélanie Fraser described as beautiful. He had seen an engraving of her once, in a print shop window. Neither the description nor the picture had done her justice. He had seen women with more perfect features, more flawless complexions, more voluptuous bodies, but there was a radiance about Mélanie Fraser that made it impossible to look away. His inner defenses slammed into place. His own wife had taught him not to trust beauty.

“Please sit down, Mr. Roth.” Her voice was as well-modulated as her husband’s, but she had a slight accent that, while not obviously French or Spanish, betrayed that English was not her native tongue. She moved toward a green satin sofa, her gown rustling softly. The only sign that she had dressed hastily was the few strands of dark hair that had escaped about her face—that, and the absence of any jewelry. She looked like a woman who always wore earrings. “I’ve had coffee sent in,” she said. “I imagine you could use it as much as we can.”

Roth glanced at the sofa table, where a silver coffee service and an array of porcelain cups were set out on an intricately patterned blue-and-white tray that was probably Wedgwood. He wasn’t sure what startled him more, the fact that Mélanie Fraser was composed enough to make such an offer or that she had been thoughtful enough to do so. In truth, the coffee would be welcome. He’d been questioning a trio of robbery suspects in the Brown Bear Tavern until past three in the morning. He had just returned to the Public Office to write up his notes when Charles Fraser’s message arrived.

He crossed to a chair opposite the sofa, a spindly thing upholstered in a shiny cream-colored fabric. He found himself wondering how they managed to keep the upholstery clean. Perhaps they simply had it recovered every year.

Charles Fraser dropped down on the sofa beside his wife. He moved with the loose-limbed elegance of one bred to command. “You saw the garden and Colin’s room?”

Roth nodded. “I was hoping there’d turn out to be some mistake. But I’m afraid there’s no doubt your son was taken.”

Mélanie Fraser set down the coffeepot with a thud that echoed through the room. Coffee spattered onto the glossy surface of the table and the delicate folds of her gown. “We know that.” Her voice shook, cutting through the cinnamon and cloves of the potpourri-scented air. “We wouldn’t have sent for you otherwise.”

Charles Fraser put a hand on his wife’s arm. She drew a harsh breath, stirring the pleated muslin at the neck of her gown. “I’m sorry.” She jabbed the loose strands of hair behind her ear. “It’s just so bloody awful.”

The light from the branch of candles on the sofa table fell full on her face, revealing what Roth hadn’t been able to see from the doorway. Her posture might be perfect, her voice controlled, her manners impeccable—but her eyes held a raw anguish that Roth had seen in the eyes of Billingsgate fishwives and Oxford Street milliners and Covent Garden harlots. The sick terror of a mother who fears for her child was a universal language, whatever the woman’s accent. He felt a rush of cold shame. Mélanie Fraser might not deserve more consideration than a woman of lower station, but neither did she deserve less.