Secrets of a Lady

not violate decorum.

“Stop fussing at it, Mel.” Charles tossed down the last of the whisky. “I won’t die before Geoffrey gets here. Go up and see Jessica and put on a dry gown before you catch a chill.”

The reminder of their daughter convinced her. Her gown was half dry and she had stopped shivering, so she went to Jessica’s room first. She found Jessica curled up on the sofa beside Blanca, listening to a story. The moment Melanie stepped into the room, Jessica jumped down, ran across the room, and hurled herself at her mother’s legs.

Melanie knelt beside Jessica and hugged her with a tightness that even she recognized as desperation.

Jessica wrapped her arms round Melanie’s neck and buried her face in Melanie’s shoulder, the way she did when she’d had a nightmare or when she’d been frightened by the guns at a military review or on a memorable occasion that involved smugglers, excisemen, and a particularly treacherous stretch of the Perthshire coast. Melanie drew her daughter over to the window seat. She and Charles didn’t exactly have a perfect record for keeping their children out of danger, but at least whatever happened they’d managed to protect Colin and Jessica. So far.

“Have you got Colin?” Jessica asked, her face squished against Melanie’s skirt.

“Not yet, querida.” Melanie sat down on the window seat and settled Jessica in her lap. How to offer reassurance without lying? “But we know what we need to do to get him back.”

Jessica drew back and looked at her. “Your dress is wet and your hair’s all crooked.” She stared at Melanie for a moment. Her eyes seemed bigger than usual and her face thinner. She picked at embroidery on the falling collar of Melanie’s gown. “I don’t want to go away like Colin did.”

Melanie looked into her daughter’s face. Charles’s eyes and jaw, her own nose and mouth, and something about the cheekbones that was pure Colin. “You won’t, love.” Her voice shook with the fierceness of it. “I promise.” As she spoke the words, she heard an echo of a similar promise made to another little girl, a sister, not a daughter. The taste of bitter failure welled up on her tongue.

“Jessica—” She stroked Jessica’s tousled hair. “What happened to Colin was very bad and it shouldn’t have happened, but we’re going to get him back and make sure it never happens again.”

Jessica nodded with a simple, breathtaking trust that closed round Melanie’s heart like a fist. Eyes smarting, Melanie reached for the storybook to finish reading the story Blanca had started. Jessica slithered down and sprawled against her, feet stretched out on the window seat, head flopped against Melanie’s arm, in that boneless way that made it difficult to tell where her body left off and one’s own began. Her wide, sleep-tinged gray eyes were fixed on Melanie’s face with that same terrifying trust. When Melanie finished the story, Jessica let her tuck her into bed. She did not even protest too vigorously when Melanie said she had to go back downstairs. “Bring Colin,” she murmured, her eyes drifting closed.

Melanie shut the door of her daughter’s room and leaned against the cool panels. Even if—when—they got Colin back, the children’s lives would not return to normal. She could not imagine circumstances under which Charles would want to continue with their marriage. The best she could hope was that they could establish some sort of truce for Colin and Jessica’s sake. A fiction of a marriage within which they led separate lives, as did many couples in the beau monde. The worst—

Charles had every right to throw her out of the household in which she had been living under false pretenses for seven years. It would not be in his character to do so. And yet she had never pushed him this far. They were on uncharted ground.

She drew a breath and walked down the corridor to the room she and her husband shared, unlike most couples in their set. The bed where they had made love only two nights ago loomed before her. Their dressing gowns lay together in an untidy heap on the chaise longue. Berowne, whom she and Charles had rescued from the streets as an orphaned kitten, was curled up on top of some notes for a speech she was supposed to give on women’s education.

She took a step forward and found her vision blurred and her cheeks damp. Tears were streaming down her face. A sob tore through her, squeezing her chest, pulling painfully on the wound in her side. She gripped the bedpost, her face pressed into the fluted wood, her body wracked by shudders.

Something soft brushed her leg. Berowne. He gave a mew, half plaintive, half concerned. She dropped to her knees and ran her fingers through his warm fur.

The tears still spilled down her face. She knew from experience that it would be a waste of much-needed energy to try to stop them. She sank down at her dressing table, slid her fingers into her hair, and pressed the palms of her hands over her eyes.

When she finally lifted her head, her splotched, tear-streaked face was reflected back at her in the looking glass panels. If one discounted the faint lines about her eyes, the plucked arch of her brows, the fashionably cropped curls falling over her forehead, it was the same face she had always had. The face of the girl who had known Shakespeare and Moliere and Beaumarchais backwards and forwards but had understood nothing of the world; of the child whore whose life had been reduced to survival; of Raoul O’Roarke’s most trusted agent; of Charles Fraser’s wife and dearest friend; of Colin and Jessica’s mother. Melanie Fraser, who could speak to a reform society in the morning and take her children out for ices in the afternoon and give a dinner for fifty in the evening, without ever looking flustered or forgetting to wear the right shoes and earrings.

“I don’t know how you do it,” her friend Isobel Lydgate—herself the enviably competent mother of three and wife of a rising young Member of Parliament—had said only last week. “I often feel like I’m failing on three fronts at once.”

“Oh, darling, that’s inevitable,” Melanie had replied with a laugh. “The trick is not minding when you do fail.”

But that was only part of it, of course. Isobel was one of her closest friends, but she hadn’t the least idea how truly precarious Melanie’s life was. The trick was bundling your life into neat, separate little boxes and believing your own deceptions. The trick was smiling and sipping champagne even though you knew the boxes might break apart and come tumbling down about your ears at any moment. The trick was acknowledging the inner scream of panic that welled up all too often but never, ever letting anyone else hear it.

She remembered waking the morning after her wedding and turning to look at the tousled oak-brown head on the pillow beside her. A knot of terror had closed her throat as she realized that her performance as Mrs. Charles Fraser would not be rounded by the span of a play or the length of a specific mission but would stretch for the foreseeable future.

If her life had taken a different turn, if she had made different choices, she might be preparing to open a new production of Romeo and Juliet, like Violet Goddard. Or dying of consumption in a brothel, like Susan Trevennen. Instead, she lived an aristocratic life that was at odds with the principles she claimed to believe in, whatever the comfortingly reformist politics of her husband. She was admired and sought after by a society that would shun her if they had the faintest idea of her origins. She was the wife of a man who would never believe she loved him, the mother of children whom she could never tell the truth about their heritage.

If she were honorable in the best British tradition, no doubt she would disappear onto the Continent and leave her husband and children to get on with their lives. But even in the guise of Mrs. Charles Fraser she had never fully embraced the values of her husband’s world. Custody of the children would go to Charles if their marriage was legally ended. And yet Charles had no grounds for divorce or separation. He could not reveal her treachery without damaging his own reputation and career and hurting the children. He might risk himself, but he’d never risk Colin and Jessica. It was leverage of a sort.

Sacrebleu. That she should be thinking of leverage on Charles. But she wouldn’t have survived this long if she hadn’t learned to employ whatever means were necessary to win. Just as she would fight heart and soul to get Colin back from Carevalo, she would battle to the death to keep Charles from taking their children from her.

She looked down at Berowne, now curling himself into a ball beside her chair. “I won’t leave,” she promised, to the cat, to Colin and Jessica, to herself.

She poured water from the rose-patterned ewer into the matching basin and splashed her face. Her breathing was steadier, as though having acknowledged this decision eased the tumult inside her. She unhooked her gown, stripped off her ruined chemise, unlaced her sodden half-boots, and began to pull on fresh clothing.

Charles’s makeshift bandage was still in place, and the wound hadn’t started bleeding again, but it still hurt to move her arm, which made dressing an awkward business. She chose a gown with a waistcoat bodice that buttoned down the front, but she had still only managed two of the buttons when Blanca slipped into the