Secrets of a Lady

it?”

He looked into her eyes. Wisps of dark hair clung to her cheeks and neck. Her high-standing velvet collar was crushed on one side where he’d held her in the carriage.

Melanie returned his gaze, then shrugged out of the pelisse and laid it over a chair back. She opened her valise and took out a roll of lint. “Do we tend to your injuries first or mine?”

She changed the dressing on his wound first. Blood had seeped through the stitches and matted the dressing to his skin, which made the process of taking the bandage off tiresome and more than a little uncomfortable. But the blood, Melanie reported as she cleaned the wound with sherry, was bright red, with no sign of infection.

Other than that, she said little as she fitted a fresh bandage over the stitches and fastened it in place. Neither of them referred to her nightmare nor to the mutilation Colin had suffered and the risk of infection their son ran if his own wound was not being tended to properly.

The cut in Melanie’s side was still raw and red, but there was no sign of swelling. She sat on the settle before the fire, her gaze on the flames, while he removed the bandage. And then, without looking at him, she broke the silence with a single word. “Lescaut.”

He turned from the table, a length of lint in his hands. “What?”

“My real name. Melanie Suzanne Lescaut.”

Charles looked at his wife. Her profile was outlined against the firelight, stripped down to the essentials of flesh and bone. The features he could mold from memory, which could glow with innocence or sensuality or piercing intelligence. The smooth skin, the soft, ironic lips, the changeable eyes. “How did your father and sister die?” he said.

She turned to look at him. Her eyes had the turbulent emptiness of the sea after a storm.

“The nightmares weren’t part of the deception,” he said.

“No. The nightmares weren’t part of the deception.” She turned back to the fire. She had taken off her gown and chemise so he could tend to the wound. He’d draped a blanket round her, but her right shoulder was exposed, a bare, vulnerable curve. “I used to be able to control them,” she said. “The nightmares. I only had them when I slept alone, or sometimes with Blanca or—”

“With O’Roarke.”

“Yes.” She pleated the rough blue wool of the blanket between her fingers. “I never had a nightmare when I was playing a role until that night in the mountains with you.”

A few hours ago he might have said, What a clever way to add to the deception. Now he merely walked back to the settle, folded the lint into a pad, and placed it over the wound in her side.

She held the bandage in place while he fastened it with a length of lint bound round her ribs. “Papa was an actor—an actor-manager, though not nearly so grand as Kemble. He had a small troupe that traveled in the provinces on both sides of the French-Spanish border. He met Mama when he was performing in Barcelona. Her parents were landowners—what you’d call ‘country gentry’ here. I never met them. They disowned her when she eloped with Papa—an actor, a Frenchman, and a Jew to boot.” She looked up at him. “Do you remember the pearl cross Edgar and Lydia gave me last Christmas? That’s why I don’t like to wear it.”

“Understandable.” He knotted the lint and clipped off the ends.

“A silly sort of weakness. Just the sort of thing that betrays you, Raoul would say.”

She stood, arms raised. He took a fresh chemise from her valise and dropped it over her head in place of the sweat-soaked one she’d been wearing. “Your father’s favorite writer was Beaumarchais?” he said.

“Next to Shakespeare.” Her head emerged from the folds of linen and lace. “How did you guess?”

“Suzanne.”

She gave a brief smile. “I never got to play Figaro’s Suzanne. Papa said I could when I was sixteen.”

“I take it he was an ardent supporter of the revolution.”

“Dear God, yes.” She gave a dry laugh. “Poor word choice again. Papa didn’t believe in God. I wish I could have seen him in the early days of the revolution. By the time I was born the Terror had begun and one couldn’t be an idealist without a healthy dose of cynicism. Still, his beliefs never died. He passed his love of liberty on to me, along with his love of theater.”

“Did your mother act as well?”

“She was back onstage a fortnight after I was born.” Melanie stepped into her gown and slid her arms into the long sleeves. “I’m not sure which she fell in love with first, Papa or the theater, but she was mad for both. They put me onstage before I could walk. I grew up traveling from town to town, falling asleep in dressing rooms, helping actors practice their lines, experimenting with greasepaint.” She tugged the pale gray fabric over her shoulders. “It was a happy childhood.”

“So that’s how you learned Shakespeare backwards and forwards.”

She dropped onto the settle. “I knew the plays in French and Spanish before I read the English. I was the changeling boy in Midsummer Night’s Dream when I was three, one of the princes in the Tower when I was five, Ariel when I was ten. Mama never got to see that. She died when Rosie was born.”

“Rosie?” He stared down at the row of hooks and eyes on her gown. “Rosine?”

“Rosalind. I told you Papa liked Shakespeare even better than Beaumarchais. He wanted to call me Beatrice, but Mama said it was too much of a mouthful for a child. They compromised on Melanie. She convinced him it was after the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.”

He fastened the first of the hooks, his gaze fixed on the flattened copper and the shiny gray fabric. “How much younger was Rosie?”

“Seven years.”

“So you mothered her.”

“In a sense.” She fingered the bands of charcoal satin on her cuffs. “There were a great many people to take care of us, but not having a mother made us that much closer.”

“It was much the same for Edgar and Gisele and me. We had a mother, of course, but we often didn’t see her for months at a time.” He did up the last hook and straightened the narrow lace ruff at her throat. “Being the eldest takes on an added weight.”

She bent her head, her gaze on her hands. “Colin reminds me of Rosie, more than Jessica. The dark hair, the pale skin, the strong brows. She had a stubborn streak. Colin and Jessica are easier to cope with. Or perhaps I’m the one who’s improved.” She leaned toward the fire, hands between her knees. “We were in Spain in December of 1808. I was playing Juliet for the first time.”

Charles moved to the fireplace and looked at her vivid face. Despite the shadows round her eyes, a clear, fresh, heartbreaking sweetness shone through. She would have been an enchanting Juliet. “I’d give a great deal to have seen you.”

Her mouth curved in a bleak smile. “I’m sure I didn’t grasp all the nuances—though I felt terribly sophisticated—but people thought it a great novelty to have Juliet played by a girl who was almost as young as the character’s meant to be.”

Charles dug his shoulder into the pine mantel. The year 1808 had been the early days of the war in the Peninsula. The French, who had occupied the country, had been temporarily driven back by the Spanish resistance. Napoleon had come to Spain himself with reinforcements to retake the country. A British expeditionary force under Sir John Moore was supposed to be assisting the increasingly fragmented Spanish resistance, but Moore had been forced into an inglorious retreat to the coast by the victorious French. “Did your father have any idea how dangerous it was?”

“We were actors. There were people in the company who supported both sides. He thought we’d be all right as long as we stayed out of the path of the various armies.” Her fingers twisted in the delicate fabric of her skirt. “One of the company had family in a village not too far from Leon. We spent Christmas there. Sir John Moore’s army came through the village on their retreat.”

A knot of cold closed round Charles’s throat. He’d heard stories of Moore’s retreat. The British army had been angry at retreating without a proper fight, and the commissary could not keep them adequately provisioned. Discipline had almost completely collapsed. Pillage and wholesale slaughter had been visited on more than one Spanish village in their path.