Secrets of a Lady

The sharp smell of the river seeped into the carriage. Melanie broke the silence as they rattled across the dilapidated stones of London Bridge toward Southwark. Her voice was unusually husky. “Will we have trouble getting into the Marshalsea?”

Charles tore his gaze from the broad, greasy expanse of the Thames, thick with barges and lighters and skiffs. “They lock the gates at night, but there’s no trouble getting in during the day. My classics tutor at Oxford spent a year there. He was a brilliant man with a weakness for cards and not a lot of skill to go with it. I visited him in prison several times.”

“I remember. You told me about him when you proposed the bill to change the debt laws.”

Another image flickered across his memory. Sitting at his desk in the early hours of the morning with a dull pain in his head and a scribbled-over paper before him. Melanie bringing him coffee, perching on the edge of his desk, reading the speech, suggesting changes…

He stared at her. Betrayal wasn’t a single blow, but a series of sword cuts, each one uniquely painful. “You helped me with that speech. Not to mention God knows how many others. I let a foreign agent pen the words I spoke in the House of Commons. I suppose that ought to be funny. I suppose you thought it was funny.”

She turned to him with a sharp twist of her head. “Charles, whatever else you think of me, you must realize I believe in the same things you do. The freedom to speak and write what one believes. A legal system that doesn’t throw people in prison without charge. A life in which children don’t starve on the streets or die in workhouses or lose their limbs in factories. A say in one’s own government.”

“Liberty, equality, and fraternity?”

“In a nutshell.”

“Your Napoleon Bonaparte changed the French republic into an empire long before he lost at Waterloo.”

“I’d be the last to call Napoleon a saint or even a hero,” Melanie said. “Perhaps he betrayed the revolution and trampled on its ideals. Perhaps we all did. But I’d take what Napoleon did for France and Spain over what’s come after any day.”

“And that justifies everything you did?”

“What do you want me to say? That my belief in a tarnished ideal gave me the right to lie to you and betray you at every turn? That I see now that I was wrong, that I should have fought fairly when we both know war isn’t fair? That I turned my back on everything I believed in the moment I realized I loved you? None of those answers would be true.”

“Least of all that you love me.” Anger welled up on his tongue like fresh blood. “There’ve been enough lies between us already, Mel.”

“‘Doubt truth to be a liar; But—’” She shook her head. “I don’t expect you to believe me. I wouldn’t believe it, were our situations reversed. But I do love you, Charles. I always will.”

He returned her gaze, barricading himself against the plea in her eyes. “God,” he said, sick with her, sick with himself for wanting to believe her, “you just don’t let up, do you?”

Chapter 12

Charles sprang down from the carriage in front of the Marshalsea prison and offered his hand to Melanie. Chivalry or force of habit, he supposed. He released her as soon as she’d descended the carriage steps.

They were a world away from the decorous precincts of Mayfair or even the familiar chaos of Covent Garden. The air smelled of sour rot and the stench of refuse from the laystalls that overflowed the street. Windows were cracked or boarded over or missing entirely. Coal porters and dustmen, barefoot children, and men and women in shapeless, water-stained garments, who looked as though they scavenged on the river, pushed their way along the crowded street. Carriages clattered by, windows and doors securely locked.

The gray brick walls of the prison reared up before them, stolid, uncompromising, unrelenting. Charles surveyed the prison gates, shutting his mind to the fact that if Helen Trevennen’s uncle could give them no clue to her whereabouts, they might have reached a dead end.

As he and Melanie crossed the pavement to the prison, a boy of no more than seven caught at the skirt of his greatcoat. Charles stared into the boy’s saucerlike eyes, thought of his son, and pressed some coins into the lad’s hand.

The sky had clouded over again, adding to the gloom of the place, but the porter who admitted them at the main gate was cheerful enough. He nodded at the mention of Mr. Trevennen, gave them a set of directions that sounded like the key to a maze, and said he was sure the old gentleman would be glad of company.

The Marshalsea was like a small, walled city. They made their way along grimy cobblestoned alleys, between high, smoke-stained brick buildings that might have passed for lodging houses if one forgot about the locked gates. A group of children were playing blindman’s buff in the wider space where two alleys intersected. A woman was taking her laundry down, one eye on the darkening sky. A terrier nosed round the garbage by the steps of one of the buildings. The sound of an ill-tuned spinet came through an open casement window, the hiss of a fire through another, voices raised in argument through a third.

Many people spent the better part of their lives here. You couldn’t get out of debtors’ prison until you paid off your debts and you couldn’t earn any money to pay off your debts while you were locked up. Yet another example of the profound wisdom of the British system of justice. The same system under which, until a mere five years ago, a parent could legally sell a child to be a climbing boy or a pickpocket or a prostitute. The only crime had been the sale not of the child but of the child’s clothes.

Trevennen’s rooms were on the first floor, through a decaying wooden archway, up a sagging staircase, down a long gallery that was open on one side. Charles knocked on the splintery door. Heavy, ponderous footsteps sounded within, and the door opened.

Pale blue eyes surveyed them out of a broad, strong-boned face. “Yes? How may I help you? I don’t believe I’ve—” The blue gaze slid past Charles and fastened on Melanie. “Good Lord.” The eyes widened. The shoulders straightened. The voice deepened with the resonance of a cello. “‘’Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white/Nature’s own sweet and cunning hand laid on.’”

Melanie had been looking ill a moment before, but she gave a laugh that had the sparkle of fine champagne. “How very flattering. I can’t answer for the Countess Olivia, but I fear in my case nature gets assistance from a shocking amount of paint and lotions.”

A look of pure delight crossed Hugo Trevennen’s face. “A beauty and versed in Shakespeare.” He peered at Melanie down the bridge of his aquiline nose. “Do I know you, my dear? Appalling that I could have forgotten such a face, but living in this place does strange things to the memory.”

Melanie gave him a smile that was a perfect combination of the daughterly and the flirtatious. Charles watched Trevennen melt like candle wax beneath its warmth. “No, we haven’t met. I’m Melanie Fraser and this is my husband, Charles. We’d be very much obliged if we could have a word with you. It’s about your niece, Helen.”

Trevennen’s brows shot up. “My word. Nelly. Yes, of course. Delighted to be of help—if I can.” He smoothed his coat. The coat was threadbare and cut in a frocked style that was thirty years out of date, but the fabric was expensive and the frayed shirt beneath was spotless and carefully starched. “Do come in.”

He ushered them into a small, low-ceilinged room. Theatrical prints hung on the peeling wallpaper, and racing forms were stacked on the tabletop. The carpet looked like a Turkey rug but on closer inspection was painted canvas. Two high-backed chairs of a cheap pine painted to resemble walnut might have once graced the set of a Shakespearean drama. Charles suspected the painted screen in one corner had come from a production of The School for Scandal.

Trevennen waved them to the chairs. “Would you care for refreshment?” He swept his arm toward the tarnished brass kettle that hung from a hook over the fireplace, as though he were Prospero and could conjure crystal decanters and plates of cold salmon.

Melanie sank onto one of the Shakespearean chairs. “Please don’t trouble yourself.”

“I’m afraid I don’t entertain much these days.” Trevennen scooped some coal from the coal scuttle and threw it on the fire. “When I think of the supper parties we used to have after a performance…But I fear my large style agreed not with the leanness of my purse.”

Charles sat in the other high-backed chair. “We understand Miss Trevennen inherited her acting talent from