Secrets of a Lady

punch to the gut. For a moment his brain was choked with images, fragments, heedless confidences, nighttime whispers, unthinking, unforgivable betrayals. How many of his friends had lost their lives because of his carelessness? How many people who thought they could trust him had been betrayed because he was so foolish as to trust his wife?

He thought of his friend Fitzroy Somerset, Wellington’s military secretary, who had lost his right arm at Waterloo. He thought of the innkeeper near Salamanca who’d passed messages for him until the man was discovered by the French and shot. And then, unexpectedly, he thought of the family of afrancesados, French sympathizers, who’d sheltered him and dressed his wounds after he’d been caught in a skirmish. He’d told the family he was a French officer out of uniform, carrying dispatches to his commander. They’d believed him without question. The elder daughter was being courted by a French soldier, and by the time Charles left he’d learned some very interesting details about French troop deployment in the area.

He could still smell the scent of the hay in the barn where he’d slept and taste the fresh goat’s milk the eight-year-old son of the family brought him to drink. He could still see the boy’s bright, eager eyes as he knelt on Charles’s pallet and drank in Charles’s lies about life in the French army.

Melanie’s accusations about his intelligence work echoed in his head. In truth, he could not deny that his work had gone well beyond fetching and carrying. It had begun because he was good at ciphers, but before long he’d been asked to retrieve coded documents as well as decipher them. An odd collection of talents—a skill at playacting, a facility for languages, the ability to pick a lock and talk himself out of just about any situation—had drawn him deeper into the intelligence web.

But whatever paltry deceptions he had engaged in, whatever twinges of guilt he had felt, surely his own lies could not compare with what Melanie had done. Surely deceiving strangers on the opposite side in wartime was different from deceiving the person with whom you shared your bed and body, your work and the raising of your children and the innermost recesses of your life.

He stared at his distorted reflection in the square of glass that was the hackney window. In the street beyond, a lamplighter on a ladder was battling the rain in an effort to light the oil in the blackened globe of a street lamp. The flame sputtered, puffed, and went out. “We can’t risk letting Edgar know about your past,” Charles said.

“No.” Melanie’s voice sounded firmer than it had. “Edgar’s definitely an Othello.”

“What? Oh, I see.” He remembered their conversation when they returned from the party at the Esterhazys’—another world in which they had loved and trusted each other and been deluded enough to think they could keep their children safe. “‘And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again.’”

“You know how I adore Edgar, but he does rather tend to see everything in extremes of good and bad. He’s just the sort who would snap and turn violent if he learned his wife had betrayed him.”

“If Edgar learned Lydia was a French spy, he’d probably drop dead of shock,” Charles said. “I think I might as well. Espionage would be bound to violate her sense of decorum.”

“Poor Lydia. I sometimes think her problem is boredom as much as anything. They’d both be so much happier if—”

She bit back the words. Charles said it for her. “If they had children.”

“Yes.”

Colin was a tangible presence in the carriage, so close Charles almost imagined he could hear his son’s laugh or see the dark gleam of his hair. “Edgar would be a good father,” Charles said.

“Yes. And Lydia might take to motherhood. Perhaps—It takes some couples years to conceive a child. I said as much to Lydia only last month. Of course, it would help if she and Edgar were actually sleeping together, and though she’d never discuss such things, I rather fear they stopped sharing a bed some time ago.”

“So do I.” Charles had more than once marveled at the difference between his own marriage, born of exigency, and the passionless union that had resulted from his brother’s love match. Any such comparison had the bite of irony now, though whatever else could be said of his marriage to Melanie, it could not be called passionless.

The silence was punctuated by the familiar rustle of Melanie plucking at the skirt of her pelisse. After a moment she said, “Have you ever been to the Gilded Lily?”

“Don’t be stupid, Mel. I’ve been a married man since I came back to Britain.” In fact, his experience of brothels was limited to one visit in his Oxford days, which he had spent cooling his heels in the sitting room. Intimacy was difficult enough for him. He could never bring himself to pay for the substitute. But he was not about to go into that with the woman seated beside him, the woman with whom he had shared such intimacy that she almost might have coined him and from whom he had received nothing but lies in return.

“Then it’s a lucky thing I have some experience to go on.” Melanie’s voice was bright as cut glass. “Some brothels have a staff of girls to service clients. Some merely provide rooms to be used by courtesans and actresses, and even respectable married women who wish to meet their lovers. Some do both. I imagine the Gilded Lily is that sort. I shouldn’t think it likely we’ll meet any of your friends there, but some of the most discriminating gentlemen find a certain piquancy in going slumming. Or so I’ve been given to understand.”

Her words brought the rest of her morning’s revelations back to him. In the deluge of events, the fact that she had once been employed in a brothel had been swept aside as almost insignificant. Now he turned it over in his mind, another piece of the puzzle of the woman he had married.

The bits of information he’d gleaned during the day shifted in his head. She would have been an orphan of sixteen when Raoul O’Roarke found her in the brothel. Charles had always known she’d endured horrors before they met. What had happened to her in the brothel was probably not so very different from what he had thought she’d suffered at the hands of the French soldiers and Spanish bandits.

He stared at her, trying to see beyond the lies. “Mel—”

“What, Charles?”

What indeed? If the memories are too painful, don’t come with me? She’d laugh, and he needed her help. Tell me the whole of your past? It wasn’t the time.

She undid her pelisse at the throat and tugged off the muslin tippet at the neck of her gown. “No one will trust us if we look too fine.” She unbuttoned her gloves, then slipped off her wedding band and put it in her reticule along with the tippet.

His throat tightened with a pang that might have been anger or loss or self-loathing. He’d only seen her remove that circle of gold a handful of times since he’d placed it on her finger. He looked at her face, the sweetness about the mouth, the fresh purity in the curve of the bones. Most men of his acquaintance would be horrified by the revelation that their wives had a past, let alone that they had sold their bodies anywhere but on the Marriage Mart (save for one or two who had actually married courtesans, but that was another matter).

Charles had always claimed that whose bed a woman had shared before her marriage was no more a man’s business than it was a wife’s business to ask the same about her husband. He recalled arguing as much in an after-dinner discussion fueled by plentiful port. “It’s all very well to try to outrage us with your bohemian sensibilities, Fraser,” one of the other men present had said, staggering to the sideboard, where their host kept a chamber pot. “You’d feel differently if it was your own wife we were talking about.” And then everyone had laughed, because they all knew Melanie and they thought Charles was the last husband in London who had to worry about his wife before or after their marriage.

It was always a challenge to have one’s principles put to the test. With a detached part of his mind—a safe corner he retreated into all too often—Charles was relieved to find that he didn’t feel differently when it was his own wife involved. Melanie had never questioned his sexual past. He had no right to question hers. That she had no doubt slept with O’Roarke, not to mention God knew whom else, after their marriage was another matter entirely.

The bite of jealousy on his tongue was as unfamiliar as a draught of Blue Ruin after years of the smoothest whisky. Melanie might tease him for his naivete, but he knew the games many of their friends indulged in. He’d more than once wandered onto the terrace during a ball to hear a cry or a soft murmur from the shrubbery. Or stepped into a darkened antechamber only to have to withdraw with an averted gaze and a muttered apology. At those same entertainments he’d watched his wife glide about the room in a whisper of velvet, a rustle of silk, a stir of dark ringlets, exerting her charms with disarming insouciance and devastating accuracy. He’d been idiotically sure of her. What they had between them was too rich, too complex, too multilayered for her to risk it for transitory