They encountered a large family party by the gates. A stoop-shouldered man who kept checking his watch as though he was late for an appointment; a lady in a well-worn pelisse with the cuffs turned; a teenage girl whose legs were several inches too long for her bombazine skirt; and two boys who kept asking their parents why Grandpapa couldn’t come home with them.
She and Charles slipped out of the prison in the family’s wake. Outside they rounded two street corners, flagged down a hackney, then at the last minute waved it on, rounded another corner and did the same, then finally hailed a third hackney (no easy task in the rain), climbed in, and directed the driver to Bow Street.
Melanie fell back against the squabs. The umbrella had not kept out all the rain and she was more chilled than she cared to admit to her husband.
Charles looked at her for a moment, but he merely said, “There’s no reason to hold anything back from Roth. Except the fact that you and O’Roarke were French agents. Not to mention lovers.”
“Good God, no. Being arrested would be nearly as debilitating as being killed.” For a moment, the future crowded in on her, a myriad of unpleasant possibilities that drove the air from her lungs. Charles could turn her in to Bow Street as a French spy. One part of her mind said that he never would, but another shouted back,
Even if he didn’t expose her as a spy, he had every right to want his freedom. She owed him that at the very least.
Her breath stuck in her throat, as she forced herself to confront what lay before her. Separation. Annulment. Divorce. A friend of theirs who had been sued for criminal conversation by her husband had lost all access to her children. The woman’s drawn face flickered before Melanie’s gaze, a ghost of what was to come.
She should be prepared for this. The threat of exposure had always been there, a constant tension beneath the polished surface of her life. Sometimes she had been able to bury the fear so deeply she was scarcely aware of it herself. But a trick of memory, a turn of phrase, a look into Charles’s trusting eyes would bring it welling to the surface. Shame and guilt and sheer, bloody terror would wash over her in a cold sweat. And then she would force them all back to a place deep inside, because that was the only way she could continue with her life.
Now there could be no hiding from Charles or from herself. She had lived on borrowed time for seven years, and she would have to take the consequences.
They had crossed back over the bridge, but traffic had slowed to a maddening crawl. She rubbed at the condensation on the glass and peered out the window. A curricle had locked wheels with a brewer’s dray on the rain-soaked cobblestones. The patter of rain and the curses of other drivers echoed through the windows.
“Do you have a sister?” Charles said.
The question was as unexpected as a knife cut. She turned her head to look at him. “I had a sister. A younger sister.”
“She died.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.” It would have been better if she could have kept looking at him as she spoke, but instead she stared down at her hands. The remembered stench of blood invaded the moldering air of the hackney. “Eleven years ago.”
“When your father died.” The angry edge that had been in his voice when he asked his first questions about her life was gone. Something in his quiet tone was close to Charles her husband and she shied away from it. There were some things she hadn’t spoken about to anyone, not even Raoul.
“Yes,” she said again. Her hands curled into knots.
Their hackney lurched forward, veering round the accident. Charles looked at her for a moment across the width of the carriage. “It can’t be easy to lose a sibling,” he said. “I find it painful enough that Edgar and I aren’t the friends we once were. Gisele’s so much younger that we were never companions in the same way, but I always felt it was my job to protect her. If anything had happened to her, I think I’d have felt responsible, no matter where the blame lay.”
How, when every feeling he had ever had for her must have turned to hate, could he still read her with such devastating accuracy? Her own sister’s face swam before Melanie’s eyes. Promises made, promises broken. Surely that had not been her first betrayal, but it was the first she remembered. “One can’t dwell on one’s failures,” she said. “Or we’d all go mad.”
“Did O’Roarke tell you that?” His voice turned harsh.
“No, you did. After those documents got lost that you were supposed to collect from Count Nesselrode.”
She watched understanding dawn in his eyes. She wasn’t sure why she had said it, save that his anger was easier to bear than the excruciating hint of softness that had crept into his expression.
“Of course,” he said. “There seems to be no end to my idiocy. To think it never occurred to me that those papers disappeared because my wife had taken them.”
“It was damnably difficult.” She made her voice brittle, slashing at him, slashing at herself, reminding them both of everything that had been destroyed between them. It was a form of self-mutilation. Better to sink into the gutter of hatred than to delude herself into thinking anything was left of what he’d once felt for her. “You never were an easy man to deceive, Charles. Raoul warned me you were dangerous when he sent me after the ring. He said you notice details most people would ignore.”
“Probably because I overlooked the most important detail of all where you were concerned. Oh, Christ.” His hands clenched. He stared at her with eyes that were dark and hate-filled. “Do you have any idea how many people went to their deaths because of your duplicity and my criminal stupidity?”
“It was war, Charles.” She kept her gaze steady, because this was a demon she was used to battling. “People die. Good people, innocent people. Different people may have died because of things you told me, but people would have died anyway.”
He was silent for a moment. When he spoke his voice was low and raw. “But they wouldn’t have been on my conscience.”
She shook her head. “I know you think the world is your responsibility, Charles. But you of all people should know that if they’re on anyone’s conscience, they’re on mine.”
“But you could have done nothing without my complicity. It seems we continue to be partners. You betrayed me, but in trusting you I betrayed my friends, my country, and any shred of honor I possessed.”
“Oh, Charles.” Tenderness for him welled up in her chest. “Underneath the radical reformer, you’re still a British gentleman to the core.”
“It isn’t only gentlemen who take their word of honor seriously.”
“No, but you’ve been bred from the cradle to place it above all else.”
He turned his gaze to the hackney window. “Perhaps I’m being a bloody, idealistic fool. But in this shifting sands of a world we live in, I’d like to believe my word at least counts for something. Otherwise I don’t see that I have much integrity left.”
She studied the bleak outline of his profile. “Yes, but your word to whom, darling? The line between honor and dishonor is often a matter of definition. After all—” She bit back the words.
He swung his gaze toward her. “What?”
She hesitated a moment. “
He gave a rough, incredulous laugh. “Oh, for God’s sake, Mel. Don’t compare us. I’m far out of your league.”
“I know you don’t like to use the word. Partly out of modesty; partly, I think, because you don’t like the associations of what it means to be a spy. But you can’t deny that your errands for the ambassador were a lot more than fetching and carrying.”
“Fetching and carrying can be damnably difficult. But all I did was—”
“Steal documents. Slip behind enemy lines. Pose as a French soldier or a Portuguese
“You know the answer to that better than I do.”
“Call it what you will, Charles, you couldn’t do the things you did in the war without being an expert at —”
“Lying?”
“I was going to say deception. But what is deception but a form of lying?”
