finely molded mouths. So alike and so different. At thirty, Edgar still had an open, sunny countenance. Charles, she knew from a painting of the Fraser children, had had lines of experience etched in his face at fourteen.
Edgar got to his feet and turned to poke up the fire. “And to think I get accused of being the reckless one. You’re a damned fool.”
“Quite possibly,” Charles said.
Edgar jammed the poker into the coals. “And you are too, Melanie.”
“Undoubtedly.” Melanie turned to Laura. “Could you see what Mrs. Erskine can manage for us in the kitchen? Something simple and nourishing and easy to get down, like soup. And plenty of coffee.”
“Yes, of course.” Laura slipped from the room.
Charles spoke to his brother’s back. “Come with us tonight and make sure we don’t take our foolery too far. You’ve been to Mannerling’s before?”
Edgar spun round. “Confound it, Charles, can’t I have any secrets from you?”
“Elder-brother intuition.” Charles grinned, in the way he probably had when they were boys. Melanie thought the grin was a sort of apology. “I know you’ve always been fond of roulette. There aren’t that many places to play it in London. Will we have trouble getting in?”
“Not if the porter recognizes me.” Edgar returned the poker to its stand. “I haven’t been there all that often. It’s run by a Julia Mannerling, a widow. Supposedly her husband was an army officer, though frankly I have doubts that he ever existed. It’s a sight more raffish than Waitier’s was.” His gaze flickered in Melanie’s direction.
“Edgar,” Melanie said, “if you’re going to say I can’t go there—”
Edgar gave her a smile that made him look very like Charles. “At this point, I wouldn’t dare tell you not to do anything, sister.”
Charles shifted his leg on the footstool. “We’ll leave at eleven-thirty. Depending on what we learn, at dawn one or more of us can start for Surrey to see Mrs. Jennings. How long until you have to report to Castlereagh, Edgar?”
“I sent him a message when I got here saying I hadn’t been able to discover anything so far. That will do until tomorrow. Thank God Lydia’s in the country with her parents. I couldn’t silence her questions so easily.”
Melanie walked to the sideboard, poured herself a glass of whisky, and swallowed half of it in one gulp. Now that Charles’s wound had been treated, the churning need to keep moving, to be doing
“More than three hours before we can hope to find Jemmy Moore,” Charles said behind her.
“Yes.” She returned to the fireplace and dropped down in a chair across from him. He was still very pale, but he was no longer shaking and his breathing seemed more regular. “Darling, shouldn’t we see if we can find Victor Velasquez and tell him about Colin? He might call off his hounds.”
Charles’s gaze had shifted to the fire. “No,” he said without glancing at her.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t think it would persuade him to call off his hounds.”
“I know he’s a royalist to the bone and he hates Carevalo, but he always struck me as fundamentally decent. It’s worth a try—”
“And because if Velasquez knew my son was in danger it might make him all the more eager to do whatever it takes to stop us.”
She set her glass down on the table beside her. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”
He continued to look into the fire. There was a set quality to his expression, as though he were holding pain at bay, but she wasn’t sure the pain came from the bullet wound. Edgar, standing beside the fireplace, had gone very still.
“Why doesn’t matter,” Charles said.
A muscle twitched beside Charles’s jaw. “My history with Victor Velasquez doesn’t. Trust me.”
Edgar cleared his throat. “Melanie, perhaps it would be best—”
“Stay out of this, Edgar.” She sprang to her feet, leaned over the chair, and grabbed Charles by the shoulders. “Charles Kenneth Malcolm Fraser, our son’s life is at stake.”
He looked up at her, his eyes cold and hard. “I had grasped that fact.”
Her grip on his shoulders tightened. “Then stop being so bloody high-handed.”
“Melanie, the least you can do is trust me when I say it’s unimportant—”
“Goddamnit, Charles.” Her face was inches from his. “Don’t you dare try to tell me that anything is unimportant that may have the smallest chance of having anything to do with why Colin’s been taken or with this damned ring that’s the key to getting him back. You have no right to make that sort of decision for yourself.”
His gaze locked with hers. His face was like a thing carved from alabaster in the firelight. “Velasquez hates me. He has a right to hate me.”
She held his gaze with her own. “Why?”
He released his breath, a sound harsher than when Geoffrey was digging the bullet out of his leg. “Because I murdered his cousin.”
Edgar stared down at his brother. “Charles, for God’s sake, what are you talking about?”
“She has a point, Edgar.” Charles kept his gaze on Melanie. “Husbands and wives shouldn’t have secrets from each other.”
That last was a challenge. Melanie took him up on it. “No, they shouldn’t.” She dropped back into her chair. “At least once the truth is out, it can be faced.”
“An interesting way of putting it.” They regarded each other for a moment. The day’s revelations thrummed in the air between them, like pistol shots echoing across the green after a duel.
Edgar sat down on a cushioned bench between them. “Charles, I may not know your secrets as I did when we were boys, but I’d stake my life on it that you didn’t murder anyone.”
“There we’re in agreement,” Melanie said. She leaned back against the carved mahogany slats of the chair. “Charles? Without the melodrama?”
“She’s dead,” Charles said. “If it wasn’t for me she wouldn’t be. You could call that murder.”
Quiet settled over the library, an uneasy quiet that precedes a storm. The tension of words as yet unvoiced pressed against the oak wainscot. “Who?” Melanie asked.
“Kitty—Katelina Ashford.”
Edgar sucked in his breath. “Charles—” He looked at his brother, as though Charles was a man pushing himself beyond the limits of his endurance. “Are you sure you want to tell us this?”
“Not in the least, but I don’t see an alternative.”
“Kitty Ashford?” Melanie sifted through her memories, trying to find an image to go with the half-remembered name. Her first days in Lisbon. A party at the embassy. Two officers’ wives whispering behind the ivory sticks of their fans. “She was a Spanish noblewoman married to an English officer. She died. Not long before I came to Lisbon. Some sort of accident. I forgot she was Velasquez’s cousin. So that means she was connected to Carevalo, too?”
“Aristocratic families are as intermarried in Spain as they are here. Kitty and Victor’s grandmother was a Carevalo daughter who married a Velasquez. Their daughter was Kitty’s mother and their son was Victor’s father.” Charles’s voice sounded distanced, as though he was speaking about events that had little meaning for him. Charles only spoke like that when his feelings were very near to the surface indeed. “Kitty and Velasquez were close as children. I think he was half in love with her. It’s not surprising. She was quite lovely.”
His voice had an odd quality to it as he said this last. For a moment his gaze was somewhere beyond the confines of the library. It occurred to Melanie that she had never, in the seven years she had known him, heard him describe another woman as lovely. The word lingered in the air, with echoes that went beyond mere physical beauty. Her fingers closed on the
