would you have suggested we do next?”
Melanie forced her mind to focus on the question. “Probably that we travel to Surrey and visit Mrs. Jennings. Wives often know more than their husbands realize.” It occurred to her that this last phrase had unfortunate reverberations, but she plunged on without waiting for Charles’s reaction. “Mrs. Jennings may have known her husband had a mistress and she may even have known the woman had been an actress at the Drury Lane. Do you think that’s how Lorano tracked Helen Trevennen here?”
“It seems the likeliest explanation.” Charles realigned the edges of a stack of scripts on the desk. “His questioning technique doesn’t sound particularly subtle. It’s a good bet we can learn something he overlooked.”
“Violet Goddard is a very good actress,” Melanie said, thinking back to various performances they had seen Miss Goddard give at the Drury Lane.
“Yes.” Charles prowled the narrow length of the room again, a tall, lean, impatient figure, like Raoul a few hours ago at Mivart’s. “It won’t be easy to get her to say anything she doesn’t want to say.”
Thurgood returned a few moments later accompanied by a slender young woman with pale gold hair that flowed loose about her shoulders and gave her something of the look of a Renaissance Madonna. She wore a gold silk shawl and a heavy wool rehearsal skirt over a stylish gown of chestnut lustring. Violet Goddard was slighter in person than she appeared onstage, but she carried herself with the same graceful bearing. She paused just beyond the doorway and gave a full, deliberate smile, brighter than a dozen wax tapers. Her fine-boned face went from passably pretty to incandescent.
“Violet Goddard.” Thurgood pulled the door closed behind them. “Mr. and Mrs. Fraser, Violet. We’d like to help them in any way we can.”
Charles held out his chair to Miss Goddard. The gesture earned him a faint look of surprise. She sank into the chair in one elegant, economical movement, so that the bulky overskirt fell about her in graceful folds. Thurgood excused himself to return to the stage.
“Thank you for seeing us, Miss Goddard,” Charles said, as though she might have had a choice about it. “We know you are in the last days of rehearsal.”
Miss Goddard smiled, this time with an ironic tilt to her mouth, as though to say the interview had been a command and she knew it. “It’s of no moment, Mr. Fraser. They’ll be rehearsing the fight for at least another hour. For some reason, duels are much more difficult to choreograph than love scenes.”
Sensations teased at the edges of Melanie’s memory. Clashing swords. The swish of a velvet cape. The rustle of a brocade gown. The feel of standing in the wings, waiting to step onstage, more heady than champagne, more nerve-racking than her first presentation at court. “I’ve always thought it unfair that Juliet is excluded from such an exciting part of the play,” she said. “It gives the actress entirely too much time to think.”
“Yes.” Miss Goddard’s eyes brightened with fellow feeling. Then she caught herself up short. How much fellow feeling could there be between an actress and a political hostess? Little did she know.
Charles gave an easy smile that was a tribute to his own acting ability. “We saw you as Lady Teazle last year. The scene with the screen was the funniest I’ve ever seen it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Fraser. It’s one of my favorite roles.” Miss Goddard folded her hands in her lap with the delicacy of a woman who has learned to infuse her every gesture with grace. The dazzling charm, her professional armor, was in place once again. Her eyes sparkled, part Juliet, part Cleopatra. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
Charles repeated his story about Jennings and the bequest to Helen Trevennen.
Miss Goddard listened in silence. She had shrewd eyes, set in an elegant, well-groomed face. The face could have belonged to any lady in Mayfair, but the eyes had seen things no gently bred girl was meant to witness. Melanie wondered if her own gaze could betray her past as easily. Perhaps it took one who shared the experience to recognize the signs.
“I wish I could be of more help,” Miss Goddard said when Charles finished. The words sounded just the slightest bit too rehearsed. Her voice was cultured, with an underlay of Spitalfields. “But I fear I can tell you no more than I told the Spanish gentleman who was here last week. I haven’t seen Helen in nearly seven years.”
Charles was leaning against the desk, arms folded across his chest. “But you weren’t as surprised as everyone else by her disappearance?”
Her eyes widened. “How did you know?” she said, and then bit her lip at the easy trap she had fallen into.
Charles hitched himself up on the edge of the desk. “She talked to you before she left?”
Miss Goddard stared down at her well-tended nails.
“I assure you we mean Miss Trevennen no harm,” Charles said. “Surely she would appreciate my friend’s bequest and the sentiment behind it.”
Miss Goddard gave a faint, unstudied smile that made her appear more girlish. She was probably not yet five-and-twenty, Melanie realized, younger than she was herself. “Helen had little use for sentiment, but she would undoubtedly appreciate the bequest. However, as I said, I haven’t heard from her in seven years.”
Charles wandered about the room and stopped to study a framed notice advertising Mrs. Siddons in
Miss Goddard drew in her breath. “Mr. Fraser, I meant what I said.”
“Miss Goddard, so did I.”
Her gaze flickered over his face. “Your determination to carry out your friend’s wishes is extreme, Mr. Fraser.”
“Trust that I have my reasons, madam.”
She regarded him a moment longer. Melanie could see her weighing the consequences in the blue depths of her eyes. Then Miss Goddard gave a slight shrug, fluttering the gold silk of her Norwich shawl. “I don’t know why I’m so determined to protect her. It’s more, I’m sure, than Helen would do for me.”
“She was your friend.” Now that he had achieved his objective, Charles’s voice turned gentle.
“I suppose you could say that.” Miss Goddard ran her fingers over the shawl. “Helen made a friend of me because she found me useful. I can’t tell you how many pairs of my silk stockings she ruined, how many scarves and earrings she borrowed and never returned.” She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “I was only sixteen when I met her. Helen wasn’t that much older, but she was a font of useful advice about how to get on in the world. Besides”—Miss Goddard hesitated a moment, then continued, her head held high—“Helen knew how to speak and how to carry herself and which fork to use with the fish. I’ll always be grateful she taught me that. And she could be tremendous fun, even if she had a tendency to leave others to pay the reckoning and cope with the consequences.”
Charles returned to the desk. “You shared confidences?”
“Helen wasn’t the sort to confide much in anyone. But—” Miss Goddard was silent for a moment, then spoke in a rush. “The night before she disappeared she asked me to go to a tavern with her after the performance. There was nothing unusual in that. But she insisted we choose a tavern where we wouldn’t encounter anyone else from the theater. And when we got there, she told me she was going away.”
“Where?” Charles’s face was unreadable, but he held her with his gaze.
“She didn’t say. She wouldn’t say.” Miss Goddard’s artfully plucked brows drew together. “It sounds completely mad now. It sounded mad then, and Helen was one of the least fanciful women I’ve ever known. She said I shouldn’t expect to hear from her and she wouldn’t be coming back. She said it wouldn’t be—safe.”
There was a brief silence in the cramped, dusty room. “Not safe how?” Charles said, in the same patient voice.
“She didn’t explain.”
“Was that why she was leaving? Because she was afraid of something? Or someone?”
“Yes. No.” Miss Goddard disentangled a strand of hair from one of her antique gold earrings. “She didn’t seem
