during the war?”
Charles’s gaze moved over the mantel as though he could not bear to keep still—the invitations she’d stuck into the gilt frame of the chimney glass, the wax tapers burning in the silver candlesticks, the Meissen tinderbox they’d brought back from Vienna. “Edward Ashford went to Spain with Sir John Moore in ’08. He and Kitty were betrothed before Corunna and married a few months later. Kitty stayed in Lisbon. I think she would have been happier following the drum, but Ashford was the sort who believed women—wives, at least—are meant to be sheltered. And I think he liked being free to pursue Spanish girls on the campaign.”
Melanie folded her hands. She could see where the story was going. Or where with most men one would think it was going. It did not fit what she knew of her husband. What she thought she knew. “Go on.”
“We met at a party at the embassy in Christmas of ’09. I’d taken refuge in the library.”
“What a surprise,” Melanie murmured.
He smiled, a faint lift of his mouth that didn’t reach his eyes. “Not really. The surprise was that Kitty slipped into the room, claimed she was bored to tears, and asked if I minded if she joined me.”
“And?”
“We played chess. She won.”
No wonder she had caught Charles’s interest. Melanie’s gaze flickered toward the table that held the chess game she and Charles had begun—was it only yesterday? Charles had had her in check when they left off, though she’d seen a way out of it. She could imagine the scene at that Christmas party in 1809. She knew the library in the British embassy well—she’d gone into the room often enough in search of her errant husband at some embassy function. She could imagine Charles—a younger Charles, he would have been only twenty-two—shoulders sunk into one of the burgundy leather chairs, head bent over Adam Smith or John Donne or the latest London papers. She could imagine Kitty Ashford slipping into the room.
“You were so delighted to find someone who could give you a good game that you began to play chess a great deal?” Melanie said. The words came out sounding more arch than she intended.
Charles looked into the fire, as though scenes from the past flickered between the griffons’ heads on the andirons. “We played chess. She borrowed books from me. She convinced me to take her riding outside the city, places an officer’s wife wouldn’t normally go. Kit had a restless intellect and a rebellious streak. I think that was what had drawn her to Ashford in the first place. An English soldier was the most daring and adventurous husband she could choose. Or so it seemed. She couldn’t have picked anyone more rigidly conventional than Ashford.”
Melanie willed her shoulders to relax.
His mouth twisted. “Two steps ahead of me as usual, Mel. You’re right on both counts. Though it didn’t… happen for some time. Oh, I’ll admit that from the first I—”
“Wanted her,” Melanie said.
He looked into her eyes. “Crude but true.”
“Dear God.” Edgar pushed himself to his feet. “Melanie, you shouldn’t have to listen—”
“It’s all right, Edgar. I know Charles wasn’t a virgin when he married me.”
Edgar regarded her with that puzzled expression he always wore when she said something particularly blunt.
Charles looked at his brother. “Did you know? About Kitty and me? I always wondered.”
“Not then.” Edgar ran his hand through his hair, the way Charles often did. “I wasn’t in Lisbon much in those days. Though I was at that reception the night she—the night she had her accident. Christ, it was awful. But I had no idea that she was your—A few weeks later, I heard some gossip in the officers’ mess.” He drew a breath. Beneath the embarrassment, his face ached with regret. “I wish you could have confided in me, Charles.”
“You think you could have saved me from my folly?”
“I wouldn’t presume. But after she died—you shouldn’t have had to bear your burdens alone.”
Charles’s gaze went bleak. “One could argue that that was the least I deserved.”
Edgar turned away, as though he had glimpsed something he didn’t want to face. He crossed to the table where the decanters were kept. “She’d have been a hard woman for any man to resist. She—Oh, God, Melanie, I keep putting my foot in it.”
Melanie smiled at him over her shoulder. “I’d already heard her described as beautiful.”
“There was a brightness about her.” Edgar rejoined them, carrying a glass and the whisky decanter. He stared down at the cut glass, shot through by the light of the fire. “A sort of reckless brilliance.”
“Yes.” Charles spoke without looking at his brother. “She met life head-on instead of shying away from it. Which was why sitting cooped up with the other officers’ wives in Lisbon was exactly the wrong place for her.”
Edgar refilled Charles’s and Melanie’s glasses, splashed whisky into a glass for himself, and returned to the bench.
Charles took a quick swallow of whisky, tented his fingers together, and said, as if reciting a date from a history book, “By early 1812 we were lovers.”
Melanie realized her hands were gripped tight in her lap. She knew Charles had had mistresses of course. Though he was no rake, he’d been far from inexperienced when they married. She’d never questioned him about those liaisons, but she’d always assumed he’d chosen women with whom there was no risk of emotional intimacy. He’d retreated into the safer realms of the intellect long before he reached adulthood. Detachment had been a survival mechanism, a way of coping with his father’s cutting tongue and his mother’s violent moods, and then later with his mother’s death and his own estrangement from his brother. He hadn’t let his guard down with anyone until he met Melanie.
Or so she had always thought. So he had led her to believe. But there was no mistaking what lay beneath his bonedry, factual statement. Despite the overlay of bitterness and pain, his face held an echo of what he had felt for Kitty Ashford. An echo not of lust but of an unbearable longing.
“There was no hope for it, of course.” Charles spoke with the clinical detachment she had heard Geoffrey Blackwell use when he amputated a gangrenous limb. “I did try to convince her to run off to Italy with me, but she wouldn’t leave her husband. Kit could rebel, but she took the family honor seriously. She told me once that her debt to her family went back generations. How could a love of a few months hope to compete?” He drew a breath. The wine-colored silk of his dressing gown shimmered in the firelight. “In April I was sent to retrieve some papers from Valencia. While I was gone, Kitty realized she was pregnant.”
Edgar made a strangled sound. “Good God.”
“Quite,” Charles said.
Melanie’s nails pressed into her palms. She began to have a sickening sense of where the story was headed. “Her husband was away as well?”
“Oh, yes. Ashford hadn’t been home in two months and wasn’t expected to return until after the campaigning season. Her options were not pleasant.”
“Charles,” Edgar said in a hoarse voice.
Charles glanced at his brother with something between defiance and apology. “It’s an ugly story, Edgar. But it’s got to be finished. I’m sorry for the associations.”
Edgar made no reply. Rain pattered against the long library windows. Melanie felt the heat of the fire, the hardness of the chair at her back, the dull ache of her wound. “Kitty’s death wasn’t an accident.”
“No. She threw herself off a footbridge in the garden during a reception at the embassy.”
The silence was broken by the sound of crystal shattering. Edgar’s whisky glass had fallen from his fingers, hit the leg of the bench, and broken into shards on the chestnut and gold of the carpet. Without speaking, he got to his feet and strode from the room.
The pungent smell of whisky filled the air. Melanie closed her eyes for a moment. “How do you know?”
