Secrets of a Lady

Victor Velasquez has been to see her and what if anything she knew about Helen Trevennen. And sound her out about any possible information her husband may have had that Miss Trevennen could be using for blackmail.”

Addison and Blanca both nodded. They were standing side by side. For the first time, Charles noticed that their hands were clasped. Addison had been in Charles’s employ since Charles was at Oxford, and in all those years, Blanca was his first serious love—or at least, the first Charles had known of. Addison still didn’t know that the woman he loved had been in the employ of French Intelligence. Poor devil. For a moment, Charles found himself wishing that Addison and Blanca, at least, could be left free of this hell. But now that the truth was out, they could none of them hide from it.

Blanca and Addison took the luggage downstairs. Charles picked up his walking stick. “Do you think we can look in on Jessica without waking her?”

“Let’s risk it.” Melanie picked up a pair of doeskin gloves from her dressing table. “He’s right, you know, Charles.”

“He?” Charles was at the door.

“Roth.” Melanie pulled on the gloves, tugging each finger smooth. “How can we justify keeping anything secret in the face of what’s happening to Colin?”

Charles strode across the room, dropped the walking stick, and took her by the shoulders. “For God’s sake, Mel, are you losing your grip? It would hardly help Colin if you and O’Roarke were hauled into Bow Street and questioned as foreign spies.” He released her and took a step back. “They’d probably decide I was one, too. They’d never believe I could have been married to you for so long and not have known the truth.”

Something flinched in the depths of her eyes. “If they thought that, they’d be woefully underestimating my abilities, darling.”

“Or overestimating mine.”

Melanie picked up her bonnet by its gray silk ribbons. “You’re right, of course. I was being silly. But Roth suspects something. And he doesn’t strike me as a man who’ll abandon his suspicions.”

“Even if he could guess at the truth—which I doubt—I don’t see how he could possibly prove it.”

“Oh, darling, he wouldn’t have to prove it. He’d just have to drop a word of his suspicions in the Home Secretary’s ear. Can you imagine the kick-up? I don’t—” She unwound the ribbons, which had twisted round her fingers. “I don’t want your parliamentary career to be hurt, Charles.”

“You might have thought of that before you started this farce. If you’d been caught during the war, we both could have been shot as spies.”

Denial flashed in her eyes. “I’d never have let them accuse you.”

“How? Do you imagine your word would have meant anything? You can control a lot, Mel, but you couldn’t control that. It was an implicit risk from the moment you married me.”

She swallowed, but she didn’t try to deny it. She was too honest. “It was a risk,” she admitted.

“But probably a small risk. Without proof, they’d have hesitated to execute the Duke of Rannoch’s grandson as a spy. I’d never have been trusted again, of course. At best I’d have been branded a fool. At worst a man who destroyed his honor. One could make a good argument that both are true.”

She shook her head. “The gentleman’s code again. ‘What is honor? A word.’”

“Words can have a lot of power.”

“And they can mask the truth. My God, Charles, you know better than to think honor has any chance of surviving in the midst of a war. It gets drowned in blood in the first battle.”

“One can still live by one’s own code, even then. Especially then.” He looked into her eyes, feeling the slash of her earlier accusations. “But I suppose you’d claim that my own actions in the war violated my code long before I met you.”

“Only if you make that code so simple that everything’s reduced to clear-cut choices,” Melanie said. “And you’re not a man to do that. You see all sides of a question better than anyone I know. But ultimately you had to make a choice or let all your thoughts ‘be nothing worth.’ You had a loyalty to your country and your allies and that loyalty came first. So you swallowed your scruples and deceived people for the information they could give you, information which your side could turn against theirs.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t have?” he demanded.

“I’m saying you didn’t have any choice, given where your loyalty lay. Any more than I did.”

“Damn it, Melanie—”

“Tell me you don’t know what it is to look into the eyes of the deceived and see trust, Charles. To draw innocent confidences from people, knowing all the while that you’re going to use those confidences against them.”

Her clear gaze cut through to a painful welter of memories. The family of afrancesados who had given him shelter and the boy with hero worship in his eyes. A Jesuit priest who had confided his hopes for Spain under Joseph Bonaparte to the disguised Charles and had quite unwittingly betrayed the disposition of the local French garrison. A young French sentry who had shared a flask of brandy with Charles and confessed his fear of battle, until the laudanum Charles had put into the brandy knocked him out, and Charles was able to steal the dispatches from his coat. “You’re saying I forced others to betray their friends even as you forced me to betray mine?” he said.

“You picked up military secrets from drunken soldiers in taverns. You gave out false information about British troop movements. You stole documents from people whose trust you’d won. If the people you deceived knew how you used them, I expect they’d be just as sick with self-disgust at what they’d colluded in as you are at the things you confided to me.”

The impulse to give the lie to everything she had said choked his throat, but he could not speak the words. She had thrown a glass up to his face. As ugly as the reflection was, he could not look away from it.

“So we’re equally tainted by our actions?” he said. His voice was harsh, but he couldn’t have said whether the anger was directed more at her or at himself.

“I don’t think anyone could have emerged from the hell of the war untainted. But equally? Oh, no, my darling. In my case I deceived and betrayed the man to whom I’d sworn vows of fidelity, which makes the betrayal a hundredfold worse.”

But did it change the nature of the betrayal? He looked into her eyes and found he could not answer his own question. Every qualm, every doubt, every twinge of guilt he’d ever felt, turned aside at the time by the exigencies of the moment, now echoed through his mind and senses.

Melanie tugged at the stiff lace of her collar. “I suspect Roth’s remark about Jennings stumbling across espionage was just a random shot, but I couldn’t swear to it.”

“Nor could I.” He regarded her for a moment, his keen-eyed stranger of a wife. “Do you think it’s possible?”

“That Helen Trevennen is blackmailing someone who was a French spy? Of course it’s possible. I can vouch that it’s not the sort of thing one likes to have bandied about.” She stared at him. “Sacrebleu, Charles, did you think she was blackmailing me?”

He looked back at her without flinching. “At this point, nothing would surprise me.”

She swallowed. “I deserved that. She wasn’t blackmailing me. Any chance you’ll believe me?”

He let his gaze move over her face. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Once you knew she had the ring, I think you’d have admitted the truth.”

She released her breath, a faint, harsh scrape of sound. “Thank you.”

Charles retrieved his walking stick which he’d leaned against her dressing table. “If not you, who else?”

“I didn’t know the identity of every French agent in the British army, darling.”

“Does O’Roarke know?”

“He’d know more than I do.”

“Good. When we come back from Brighton I’ll have a talk with him.” He moved to the door. “Ready?”

They walked down the corridor and eased open the door of Jessica’s room. She was curled up beneath her rose-patterned quilt. The cat, Berowne, had settled himself next to her on the pillow. Her cheek was pressed against his gray fur. Her left hand rested on the white spot on his stomach, as though she had fallen asleep stroking him.

Charles looked down at his daughter. Her porcelain skin, the short curve of her nose, the long lashes veiling her cheeks. The delicate fingers resting against the cat’s fur. The rage he had held in check throughout the scenes