order, he could find the key to deciphering who she was, this woman he had given himself to, this woman he’d believed he had known intimately. But whenever he thought he had begun to grasp the pattern, some new discovery would shake it to pieces.
He looked down at her, but the moon must have gone behind a cloud. He couldn’t see her face. Instead he put his lips against her hair, and stared into the dark silence of the night.
He thought she slept again. He dozed off himself for a bit. He came awake with a start as they pulled into the yard of the Star in Alfriston. Dawn was turning the inky sky a pale charcoal. The cobbled yard was congested—a mail coach, two post-chaises, three private carriages, and a farm cart laden with cabbages. Randall opened the carriage door and poked his head in. It would be a good half hour before a fresh team was ready.
Melanie sat up, jabbed the pins into her hair, and reached for her bonnet. “We might as well go in. We need to tend to our cuts and bruises.”
The timbered entrance hall was thronged with serving maids with jugs of hot water, post boys with tankards, and mail coach travelers gulping down mugs of milk and rum, but Melanie had a way of drawing attention in a crowd. They were shown to a whitewashed parlor with a sturdy brick fireplace and a gateleg table, supplied with hot coffee, and promised a hearty breakfast as well as plentiful warm water.
Melanie stripped off her gloves and untied the ribbons on her bonnet, then let out a groan. “
Edgar went to pour himself a cup of coffee. “I never thought we’d find ourselves visiting Aunt Frances in the midst of all this. I expect she’ll be as sharp-tongued as ever.”
“I expect she will,” Charles said. “But if there’s news of Helen Trevennen to be found in Brighton, she’ll make sure we find it.” He moved to the fireplace. “Just ignore Aunt Frances when she tries to shock you. It’s the most effective way to shut her up.”
Edgar grimaced. He took a sip of coffee, then glanced at the door. “I say, is Melanie all right? I thought I heard something in the carriage.”
“She had a bad dream.” Charles held his hands out to the fire. “Not surprising in the circumstances.”
Edgar frowned into his coffee. “Is everything all right between the two of you?”
Charles turned his head to look his brother full in the face. “Considering that our son is missing, hacked with a knife, and threatened with worse—oh, yes, Melanie and I are right as rain.”
Edgar met his gaze. “That isn’t what I meant. It’s just—I know I’m not good at reading such things and God knows we’re none of us acting normally, but something seems—well—
“What’s happened to Colin makes everything different.”
Edgar continued to look at him with a piercing gaze that held an unexpected echo of their mother in her rare moments of insight. “Perhaps I’ve no right to ask. But you do realize how lucky you are, don’t you, Charles? What you and Melanie have—” He shook his head. “When you were first married, I couldn’t make sense of it. Half the time you don’t even act as one expects lovers to act. But every so often I’ll catch you looking at each other—just
Charles stared into his brother’s clear, unshadowed blue eyes. “Thank you, Edgar.” He forced his voice to soften, though he could not quite keep the irony from it. “I’m well aware of my wife’s worth.”
Edgar set down his coffee cup and began to stir far more milk and sugar into it than he usually took. “I was convinced I was in love with Lydia when I married her. She was so lovely, so pure, so removed from all the horrors I’d seen in the war. So comfortingly sure of herself and her place in the world. She seemed to—well, to represent everything that was good about Britain.”
“Everything you’d been fighting for?”
“I suppose so. Yes. And then I looked at you…I think I thought—I hoped—I could find what you and Melanie have. Laughable, isn’t it?”
“Not at all.”
“It didn’t last, of course. Or perhaps I only dreamed it into existence in the first place. We hadn’t been married six months before I realized we hadn’t two thoughts in common. What I thought was purity was coldness. What I thought was modesty was pride. Lydia decided it was time she was married and it suited her to be an officer’s wife. I was almost irrelevant to the equation.”
The puzzled frustration on Edgar’s face and in his voice was all too familiar. When they were boys, when Edgar still confided in his elder brother, Edgar routinely spilled his heart out to Charles about some girl he was convinced was the embodiment of all womanly perfection. Invariably, he would prove to be seeing the object of his affections more as he wished her to be than as she really was. When the first flush of infatuation faded and he woke up to the fact that the girl didn’t match his idealized image, he would fall out of love as quickly as he had fallen into it.
Was Melanie right? Had Edgar ever put Kitty on a pedestal as he later had Lydia? Given the chance, would his chivalrous brother have taken Kitty to his bed, as Charles had done, or would he only have worshipped her from afar?
“Mother and Father didn’t set the best example of wedded bliss,” Charles said.
Edgar tensed at the mention of their parents. “That’s not—”
“Mother was bored and miserable with her life and found attractive men the best distraction. Father was addicted to winning and seduction was his favorite game. If there was a moment when they didn’t hate each other, it ended long before my earliest memories.” Charles had the familiar sensation of looking at his parents through the wrong end of a telescope. A bitter taste like a mouthful of burned coffee scalded his throat. “I’m sorry, Edgar, it’s not much of a heritage, but at least we survived after a fashion.”
Edgar grimaced and turned back to the window. “It didn’t exactly fit us for marriage, you mean? You’ve done well enough.”
Charles bit back a shout of bitter laughter. He remembered his father’s look of amazement on first meeting Melanie.
Even Kenneth Fraser couldn’t have known how devastatingly accurate his assessment had been. And yet, Charles realized, for all the deceptions, he had known Melanie’s strength and her courage and her intelligence from the first. One could argue that when they married he’d had a clearer image of the woman she was than Edgar had had of Lydia.
The opening of the door ended the silence that stretched between him and Edgar. Melanie came into the room carrying a tray with a steaming bowl of water and a bottle of sherry. A serving maid followed, bearing a second tray laden with a nauseating amount of food.
“You two stay here,” Edgar said when the maid had withdrawn. “I think I’ll have something to eat in the coffee room.”
“But…Oh, I see.” Melanie touched his arm. “Don’t you think it’s a little late to worry about my modesty? You can always turn your back when Charles changes the dressing.”
Edgar hesitated, then gave a crooked grin and squeezed her hand. “It won’t hurt for you to have a bit of time together.”
“What was that about?” Melanie asked when the door closed behind him.
“He’s worried something’s wrong between us.”
“I told you he had flashes of perception.”
“Yes, but why he had to pick this of all times to display them—” Charles passed a hand over his eyes. They ached, possibly from lack of sleep, though he suspected there were other reasons. “We’d been talking about our parents and about Lydia.”
Melanie began to unhook her pelisse. “Oh, dear. Not the most comfortable topics.”
“No.” He dropped his hand and blinked to recover his focus. “Edgar’s always fallen in and out of love with great ease. But marriage is damnably irrevocable.”
Melanie’s fingers stilled on the bands of ruby velvet that ran down the front of her pelisse. “Yes, it is, isn’t
