Charles pulled his watch from his pocket and snapped it open. The fitful sunlight fell on the inscription inside the cover.
The familiar engraved words slashed like a sword cut. “It’s twenty-five minutes past eleven,” he said. “Colin’s been missing for at least eight hours.”
She nodded without looking at him. “Thank you.” Her voice was parched.
He returned the watch to his pocket. “Blanca can help Addison with the jewelers. Between the two of them they can cover a lot of territory.” At the mention of his wife’s maid, a hitherto unconsidered thought occurred to him. “Oh, Christ. I suppose Blanca was a French agent, too?”
“No, Blanca was my maid. I was a French agent.”
“And Blanca knew it.”
“Charles, you know as well as anyone it’s impossible to keep secrets from one’s maid or valet.”
“But disgustingly easy, apparently, to keep them from one’s husband. I think Addison may be in love with Blanca.”
“Of course he is. He’s been in love with her since they met, though they only actually became lovers in the last couple of years—Addison kept worrying she was too young or he was compromising her virtue. I have no doubt Blanca loves him just as much. And, believe me, I didn’t put her up to it.”
Her words grated on his nerves like nails on a schoolroom slate. “Believing you does not come easily at present, madam.”
She turned her head to look him full in the face. “Blanca was a fourteen-year-old orphan when I met her, Charles. Raoul and I rescued her from her uncle’s filthy tavern where she had to fight off her uncle’s blows and the wandering hands of the customers. She would have done anything for me after we took her away from there. Lay the blame for the deception where it belongs. At my door.”
“Damn you, there’s blame enough to go round.” Nausea gripped him for a moment, like a vise. He looked at his wife. She was as familiar to him as the salt breeze off the Perthshire coast or the smell of snuff and the crack of walnuts from the back benches in the House of Commons. And at the same time, she was as much a stranger as Helen Trevennen. “How old were you?”
“How old was I when?”
“When you went to work for O’Roarke.” He ran his fingers through his hair. He had laid himself open to her in an intimate detail it seared him to remember, yet he did not know even the simplest facts of her life. “Christ, how old are you now?”
“Six-and-twenty. My birthday is the sixth of October. Raoul taught me it’s best to stick to the truth when you can.”
O’Roarke’s name was like salt poured on a raw wound. He wanted to hurt her with a savageness he could scarcely recognize in himself. “I’m surprised you can even remember the truth. Am I supposed to feel less a fool because I’ve been presenting you with jewel boxes on the correct date every year? How old were you when O’Roarke found you?”
“Sixteen.”
“A year after your father died.”
“Yes.”
Charles looked at her for a moment. He’d been constructing defenses for too long not to recognize them in others. Melanie would answer questions about working in a brothel, about being a spy and betraying her marriage vows, but she shied away from any mention of her father’s death.
He wanted to batter her defenses and force her to confront whatever she was hiding from, because that might inflict on her some fraction of the pain she’d inflicted on him. He wanted to ask more about her father, because with the part of his brain that could still think at all, he wanted to understand her.
But he said nothing. Perhaps he did not press her out of his old habit of not pushing past the boundaries she set. Or perhaps his childhood hurts were still too raw for him to force her to speak of her own, whatever else she had done.
They pulled up in front of the Thistle, and Randall ran into the tavern to deliver Charles’s message. Melanie turned her face to the window. “Charles, what do you think was in the letter from Lieutenant Jennings? Jennings wouldn’t have known he was going to die when he wrote it. He wasn’t planning to send the ring with it. He was probably just using the letter as a temporary hiding place until he gave the ring to the bandits to sell to you.”
Charles stared at the bland emptiness of the carriage seat opposite. “Romantic drivel. Erotic imaginings. He could even have written to her about his swindle with the ring, though I doubt he’d have been stupid enough to put it down in writing. And if Miss Trevennen knew what the ring was, she’d have been a fool not to try to sell it to the British government.”
“So what was she afraid of? Was Jennings protecting her from something, so that once he was gone she had to run?”
“Jennings didn’t strike me as much of a protector.” Charles folded his arms across his chest. “She could have been lying about being afraid. I get the feeling Miss Trevennen lied with great agility.”
“Yes.” Melanie put the grimy fingertips of her gloves up to her temples. “Considering how like me she seems to have been, one would think I’d understand her better.”
Charles shot a quick look at her. She sounded serious, not self-mocking, and her dark brows were drawn in concentration. “Perhaps she was running off with a wealthy lover,” he said. “That would explain why she told Violet Goddard she’d made her fortune and her life had changed.”
“Jennings’s death freed her to go off with this other man? That assumes she took her loyalty to Jennings seriously.”
“Some women do,” Charles said.
Melanie jerked as though he’d struck her. “Very true,” she said. “But that doesn’t explain the secrecy surrounding her disappearance.”
Charles scanned her face, looking for something he couldn’t have defined and wouldn’t have believed if he’d found it. “No,” he said, “it doesn’t.”
Randall swung back onto the box and gave the horses their office. Melanie fell silent as they wended their way through the London streets. They often sat thus, on their way to a rout or a reception or an evening at the theater or on an expedition to buy books for the children or attend a public meeting or see the latest Royal Academy Exhibition at Somerset House. Her profile looked as it always did, outlined against the green silk that covered the carriage walls. He would have recognized the angle of her head in the shadows of twilight. He would have known the elusive scent of her skin in cloaking darkness. How could her outward person be the same, when everything about her was false? How, through seven years of marriage, could he have been such an utter fool as never to have guessed the truth of what she was? He had an unexpected memory of one of the rare, perfect days he had spent with his mother. He must have been about ten, because it was before his sister was born. His mother had taken him and his brother riding along the Perthshire coast, and they’d picnicked on the beach. While his brother built a sand castle, his mother had pulled out a notebook and taught Charles the key to an ingenious cipher. That night she’d eaten supper with them in the nursery and tucked them into bed. He could still remember her promising them another such day tomorrow as he drifted off to sleep. But when they woke in the morning, she’d already packed her bags and left for London. They hadn’t seen her again for three months.
He’d long since accepted that he hadn’t known his mother. He would never know what had finally driven her to take her life, if she had thought of her children in those last moments or if he and his brother and sister had been as tangential to her then as they had the rest of the time.
He certainly hadn’t known his father. He would never know if Kenneth Fraser had accepted him as his heir out of duty or uncertainty. He would never know who actually had fathered him, in the crudest sense of the word.
He thought, with the stab of guilt her memory always brought, of his first love, Kitty. God knows he hadn’t understood her or he wouldn’t have failed her so badly. It was too late now to understand his parents or Kitty. In recent years, he had begun to realize that he might never know what had gone wrong between him and his brother, either.
But he would have sworn he knew Melanie to the core.
