Secrets of a Lady

“Without question.” Charles straightened up from checking the pulse of the second dragoon. The other four British soldiers were flung about the rocks, their bodies twisted and bloodied and shattered by bullets.

“Smithford’s gone, too, poor devil,” Baxter said.

“Are you hurt, Baxter?”

“Me? Nay, untouched, sir.” Baxter brushed his hand over the blood on his coat as though surprised it was there.

Charles dropped down opposite Melanie. She sat back on her heels and looked up at him. Her face was smeared with blood that must have sprayed from the dragoon she’d shot. Her eyes held a look that was part shock, part horror, part sheer guts.

Charles brushed his fingers against her cheek. He stripped off his greatcoat and laid it over Jennings, then turned to his valet, who was still slumped against the rock. “How bad’s your leg, Addison?”

“Broken, I think. I’m afraid you may have to give me the use of your horse, sir.”

“Gladly. But you had only to ask, you know. You needn’t have gone to the trouble of getting your leg broken.” Charles got to his feet and jerked his head in the direction the French had run. “I’ll reconnoiter. Make sure they’re gone.”

They were gone, as best he could tell. They’d left three of their own dead sprawled among the trees. Not twenty paces off, he found the bodies of the two Spanish bandits. Poor bastards. They’d come to the rendezvous early. It was their bad luck to have arrived in the middle of the fight.

Charles returned to the clearing to find that Baxter had kindled a fresh fire beside Jennings, and the women had contrived a splint for Addison’s leg.

Jennings died just after eleven, with barely a sound. It took them nearly the whole of the morning to tend to the dead—English, French, and Spanish.

They found nothing resembling the Carevalo Ring, but one of the Spanish bandits had a leather pouch on a cord round his neck. Someone had ripped his shirt open and loosened the drawstring on the pouch. It seemed the Carevalo Ring had existed after all. And it was now in the hands of the French.

Chapter 7

London

November 1819

“Suppose Carevalo’s right, damn his eyes,” Charles said. “Suppose the French soldiers didn’t make off with the ring.”

Melanie turned her head to look at her husband. His voice was level, almost conversational, but the light slanting through the carriage window glanced off his clenched hands. His knuckles were white. She could see him sifting through the pieces of the past, rearranging them in his head, searching for a break in the pattern. She had been doing the same herself since they left Raoul O’Roarke at Mivart’s Hotel scarcely ten minutes ago. Save that for her, the picture was different.

She put her hand over her abdomen, flat again—how proud she had been of it, how inconsequential it now seemed—nearly three years after Jessica’s birth. For all the danger seven years ago, at least Colin had been with them, tucked safely inside her.

She reached for Charles’s hand. “Perhaps you were right that it was a wild-goose chase and that the bandits never had the ring. It was all a trick to lure you into the mountains so they could steal the gold.”

“Perhaps. But one of them did have something hidden in that pouch round his neck. Which brings us back to the French dragoons. Unless one of our own party somehow managed to steal it after the fight. Baxter, Blanca, you, or me. Addison couldn’t have moved with his leg.” Charles laced his fingers through her own. She could feel the warmth of his hand through the ecru kid of her glove. “Well, mo chridh?” he said. “Are you hiding it in your jewel box?”

She managed a smile, but it turned wobbly. “I wish to God I were.”

He stared down at their clasped hands. “Suppose Blanca stumbled across the dead bandits when you sent her to the stream for water after the French soldiers ran off.”

“Blanca might rip the shirts off a pair of live men, but she’d scream bloody murder at the sight of dead ones. And she wouldn’t steal.”

“You can’t know that, Mel.” His fingers tightened round her own. “You can never really know what another person might be capable of.”

Beneath the velvet of her pelisse and the sarcenet of her gown and the linen of her chemise, her insides twisted, as if someone had turned a knife in her gut. “No,” she said. “I suppose not. What about Baxter?”

“I don’t see how he’d have had time. Unless the ring wasn’t in the pouch after all, and Baxter found it later, when we were burying the bodies. I still think the likeliest explanation is that the French soldiers made off with the ring and disposed of it for their own purposes.”

She drew in her breath. The air in the carriage was close and choking, thick with the smell of Charles’s shaving soap and her perfume and the smoke from the charcoal brazier at their feet.

“Stiffen up your sinews, my sweet,” Charles said. “I’ll talk to d’Arnot at the French embassy. He has contacts among the former Bonapartist officers. If Carevalo traced the dragoons, we can, too.”

“I should think so. In half the time.” She made her voice light, but panic closed tight round her heart. Her free hand curled into a fist, so hard she heard a stitch give way in her glove. She had an impulse to smash her hand through the watered-silk upholstery, the polished mahogany fittings, the plate-glass window. “Oh, God, darling, I want him back. I’d give anything—”

“So would I,” Charles said. Blue shadows of fatigue drew at his face. He had looked like that on the night of the battle of Waterloo, when their house in Brussels shook from cannon fire and the hall was filled with wounded soldiers. And on the nights Colin and Jessica had been born, when he’d sat beside her, in defiance of custom. He’d held her hand then, too.

She had a sudden memory of how Colin had felt when the doctor first placed him in her arms, so small and insubstantial, with a wobbly head and squirmy limbs. Charles had reached out and cupped his hand round the baby’s head. The warmth and wonder on his face had brought tears to her eyes.

“We’ll talk to Blanca and Addison,” Charles said, in the voice of an outnumbered commander recounting a desperate battle plan with calm certainty. “We’ll call on Baxter. We’ll go to the French embassy and talk to d’Arnot.”

She nodded, only half hearing, because she had come to her own decision. She was going to have to tell Charles the truth, all of it. She had known that from the moment they read Carevalo’s letter, though she hadn’t fully admitted it until now.

She was not as sick or terrified at the prospect as she ought to be. Perhaps her fear for Colin left little room for other emotions. If they could get him back, nothing else mattered. And they were not going to get him back unless Charles learned the truth.

She looked up at her husband. The familiar, ironic eyes, the full, generous mouth, the thick hair that would never quite lie smooth. She remembered the moment he had proposed to her, on a chill December night on a balcony overlooking the Tagus River. She had thought then that he was mad. She had wondered if he would ever be able to think of himself as Colin’s father. She had been a fool. Charles was the sanest man she knew, and once he gave his loyalty, he was unswerving. His capacity for love was a well she had not plumbed the depths of.

Yet.

Blanca sprang to her feet, poplin skirts snapping. “How can you accuse me of such a thing? You think I am a thief? You think I have no honor?”

Melanie crossed the small salon and took the younger woman by the hands. “We’re not accusing you, querida. We’re asking a question. We have to be sure, for Colin’s sake.”

Outrage, fear, and compassion flickered across Blanca’s face. She let out a sigh that ruffled the muslin collar of her gown and made her hands tremble. “I’m sorry, Melanie.” She rarely called Melanie by her given name when Charles was present. It was a sign of how greatly her composure had been shaken. She looked straight into Melanie’s eyes. “I didn’t take the ring. I wouldn’t have even if I’d seen the dead bandits. And I never saw