She coaxed a last ringlet to fall over Melanie’s shoulder. “There. A bit wild, but that’s the sort of place you’re going.”
“Just the thing for a gaming hell.” Melanie reached for her gloves.
Blanca set the curling tongs down on their stand and tidied the extra hairpins away in their porcelain box. Her lips trembled. “Oh, Melanie, why can’t I—”
Melanie got to her feet and gripped Blanca’s hands. “Waiting’s the hardest part. But there’s no sense in all of us going, and you need to be here to talk to Addison when he gets back.”
Blanca nodded, straightened her shoulders, and handed Melanie her scarf and cloak.
Melanie walked down the stairs, white gloves in hand, velvet cloak over her arm, skirt trailing behind her. On that first visit to Britain she’d been overwhelmed by the sheer scale on which Charles lived. She had always known that he was the grandson of a duke, that he was connected to half the British peerage, that he was the heir to estates in Scotland, England, and Ireland, a London town house, and an Italian villa. But in the relative simplicity of their lodgings in Lisbon—listening to Charles’s disparaging comments on rank and inherited privilege—his heritage had seemed more an abstract concept than the reality of who he was. Seeing him on his ancestral estate, surrounded by servants and tenants who had known him since he was a boy, there was no ignoring the world he had been born into. Whatever causes he espoused, that world would always be a part of him.
She paused at the base of the stairs. Michael, who was on duty in the hall, went to open the library doors for her. She smiled at him and he smiled back, concerned, yet mindful of his place. The servants knew she and Charles were looking for Colin, but only Addison, Blanca, and Laura Dudley knew about Carevalo and the ring.
When she and Charles came to live in Britain after Waterloo, learning to manage a large household—several large households—had been a challenge in and of itself. For the first year, she’d had to bite her tongue to keep from apologizing to the servants for the charade of the roles society forced them all to play. Even today, she was sometimes brought up short by the realization of how her marriage to Charles had catapulted her neatly over an artificial and unconscionable social divide. Yet the longer one played a role, the more natural it became. She had grown all too comfortable with the privileges she had married into.
Because she had married Charles, her children had been born into that same world of privilege. Even now, thank God, Colin had the elite of British law enforcement searching for him. Most children were more likely to encounter Bow Street Runners because they were hauled before a magistrate. Only last month, Charles had had to use all his influence to intervene when their housemaid Morag’s nine-year-old cousin was sentenced to transportation for stealing a lace cap and two silk handkerchiefs. And for all the horror Melanie had seen in Spain, nothing had quite prepared her for the story she’d heard one evening round a London dinner table, an account of a little boy who’d been sent to the gallows by good British justice and had gone to his death screaming for his mother. The boy had been six. Colin’s age.
Images of Colin and that unknown boy and her own sister chased themselves across her mind as she crossed the hall and stepped into the library. It was just past eleven, thirty maddening minutes more before they were to leave for Mannerling’s. Charles was sitting by the fireplace once again, but he had shaved and changed into a black evening coat, a waistcoat of ivory silk brocade, and black trousers, rather than the knee breeches he would have worn on a more formal occasion. Charles had little interest in fashion in the general run of things, but he had a keen eye for detail when playing a part. He had even stuck a diamond pin, which he rarely wore, in the folds of his cravat.
He turned his head at her entrance. “Edgar went up to the nursery to sit with Laura, though I think it was an excuse to avoid my company. He could scarcely look me in the eye while he was helping me dress.” Charles frowned into the shaving basin on the table beside him. “I can’t believe he was in love with Kitty. I can’t believe I wouldn’t have seen it. But I can’t deny the story unsettled him. Damn it, I shouldn’t have—”
“You couldn’t have avoided telling the story, Charles.” Melanie set her cloak and gloves over a chair back, then walked to the mantel and realigned the silver candlesticks. She couldn’t bear to be still. “If he did love Kitty, the pain must be there all the time whether it’s forced into the open or not.”
“Edgar always tended to dally with women of the demimonde or pay court to virginal debutantes. I wouldn’t have thought Kitty—”
“Was in his usual style?” She rested her forehead against the chimney glass. The mirror felt cool against the pulse pounding in her brow. “We can’t choose whom we fall in love with, Charles. Or when we fall in love with them.” She turned from the mirror. “I remember the moment I knew I loved you. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it sooner.”
She expected him to turn her words aside, as he had every other time today when she’d claimed to love him. Instead he watched her with a steady gaze that neither accepted her statement nor gave it the lie. “When was this?”
“On our first visit to Scotland.”
“And yet you went on working for O’Roarke for another year.”
“Yes, I—” She moved away from the fireplace in three impatient strides. “Oh, God, what does it matter beside what’s happening to Colin? The details don’t change the picture.”
“We can’t do anything for Colin until we leave and we can’t leave for another half hour. I hate the waiting as much as you do. Tell me.”
She turned to him, fingers biting into the flesh of her arms. She’d trained herself so well never to speak of such things that it was difficult to find the words. “For the rest of that trip I was determined to stop spying. I even thought of telling you the truth.”
“But—?”
“What could I have said? I married you because I was an enemy agent, but now I love you? You’d have laughed in my face.”
“Probably. And then? When we went to the congress? You didn’t stop spying.”
“No.” She turned and began to pace the carpet. The control that was second nature to her had cracked in pieces, leaving her throat raw, her voice unsteady. “Loving you didn’t change what I believed in. When we got to Vienna for the congress it was clear how things stood. Castlereagh—your Foreign Secretary, the man you worked for—wanted to turn the clock back on every reform made in Europe for thirty years. He and Metternich and most of the other men at the congress thought stability meant a world in which any dissent was stifled for fear of revolution. That isn’t the world I want my children to grow up in.”
“A world run by people like me.”
“If you’re going to define people by birth and fortune, yes. I don’t think that’s the future you want either, Charles.”
“Very true. I argued the point with Castlereagh on more than one occasion.”
“And where did it get you? What the hell’s the use of a lone voice arguing a point over a glass of port?” She stopped and turned to face him, breathing hard. “I’m sorry, Charles. But—”
“You thought putting Napoleon back in power would get you further than quiet diplomacy.”
“Yes.” A single word that summed up endless hours of inner turmoil. “And so I went on doing what I could. At the congress, and after Napoleon escaped and returned to France, and then when we went to Brussels with the allied army.”
“Where you watched Edgar and Fitzroy Somerset and the rest of our friends prepare to fight your countrymen at Waterloo.”
“What do you want me to say? That I felt guilty every time I smiled at a fresh-faced young ensign? I did, as it happens, but I’d never have survived if I hadn’t learned how to live with guilt long since. I had friends who fought on the French side who died as well.”
To her surprise, Charles drew in his breath. “I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “Of course you would have.” He pushed his fingers through his hair. “It was when we were in Brussels that you got so thin. I was afraid you were ill. I should have known—” He gave a mirthless smile. “That seems to be a dirge tonight, doesn’t it?”
Her heart twisted because it was so like Charles, when he must be choked with anger, to try to push past that anger and understand what had happened and why. She could not find the words to explain what the days surrounding the Battle of Waterloo had been like. The fear, the hope, the despair, the sense that her divided loyalties would finally tear her in two.
