Secrets of a Lady

“The house we were staying in was on the edge of the town square,” Melanie said. “It was afternoon. The people we were visiting had gone out. Papa and Rosie and I were alone in the house with two of the other actors. Rosie and I were fighting. She was pestering me to play dolls and I was trying to mend a rent in my costume. We heard horses’ hooves and then screams from the square. Papa and the actors ran outside. He told us to hide, but I looked through the window.” She drew a quick breath. “I saw the bullet that struck him. It went through his head.”

Charles stared at her bent dark head for a moment, then walked to the table. He looked down at the flaky game pie, the wedge of Stilton, the congealing dish of eggs. A coppery taste welled up on his tongue. “And then?”

She didn’t look at him. Her voice was level in a way that only came with a massive effort at control. “‘Liberty of bloody hand…With conscience wide as hell.’ You’ve heard Edgar talk about what happened after Badajoz, darling. It was much the same, though on a smaller scale.”

The blue and white dishes wavered before his eyes. After the siege of Badajoz, the British army had indulged in an orgy of plunder and rape and destruction. His brother’s voice echoed in his head. The things I saw men do, Charles. Men I knew. Good men. Honorable men. It was as if they were in the grip of a collective madness. Even Wellington knew he couldn’t stop it. And Sir John Moore had had far less control over his army than Wellington later did.

He poured a cup of coffee, filling the cup to an exact mark just below the lusterware rim. He carried the coffee over to her and put it in her hand, curling her fingers round the cup. She gulped down a sip and sat holding the cup between her hands like a talisman.

“They…well, you can imagine what they did to every female they could get their hands on. Four soldiers burst into the house where Rosie and I were hiding. There’s no point in going into the details and I don’t remember very much of it, which is a mercy, I suppose. The ceiling was white plaster with oak beams. One of the beams had a crack in it, and there was a cobweb in the corner. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of that ceiling.”

Charles’s fingers curled inward, until his nails cut into his palms.

“It’s difficult to separate the reality from my nightmares,” she said. “At some point they dragged us outside. I remember crawling through the square afterwards looking for Rosie.” A spasm crossed her face, swiftly subdued. “The smell of blood. It seemed to choke the air. The cobblestones were sticky with it.”

He dropped down beside the settle. “Did you find Rosie?”

“Yes.” She put the cup on the settle beside her. The coffee sloshed over the rim and dripped unheeded onto the floorboards. “They’d thrown her against some sacks in an alley. She was only eight years old. She—” For a moment Melanie’s voice cracked and her face crumpled. “I tried to stop the bleeding but it just kept coming. So much of it.”

He took her hand and clasped it between his own. She didn’t look at him, but her fingers tightened round his. “She wasn’t unconscious at first. She looked at me as if I could make her better. Such trust. I kept telling her she was going to be all right. I could lie very convincingly, even then.”

“Mel—”

“It’s her face I usually see in the nightmares. Tonight her face kept changing into Colin’s. She was only two years older than he is. Just a little girl.”

He sat back on his heels, still holding her hand, and watched her in the cool predawn light and the warm glow of the fire. “So were you.”

“No. By the end of that day I wasn’t a child anymore.”

He stroked his thumb over her fingers. For the moment, her story left no room in him for anything but tenderness. “It was my countrymen who did this.”

Her shoulders curled inward, pulling at the seams of her gown. “It was war. I saw every side, every faction of every side, commit atrocities just as vile. And yet—I admit I still can’t look at a British uniform without seeing my father with his brains spilling onto the cobblestones and my sister violated and bleeding to death. Without remembering how it felt to have my own body invaded and torn asunder. It was British soldiers who first taught me the meaning of fear and hatred.”

He turned her wrist over. In the gap where a corded loop fastened the button on her cuff, he could see the corner of a scar, a scar that he had known was there but had never asked her about. He looked up at her, a question in his eyes.

She shook her head. “No, that was later. I was posing as a Spanish peasant girl to try to infiltrate a group of guerrilleros, but they saw through my ruse. They had some interesting ways of trying to get me to talk before Raoul managed to get me out.”

Her words were calm. The images that went with them were not. Charles looked into the fire, contemplating the leap from orphaned fifteen-year-old to French agent. “What did you do after Rosie died?”

She picked up the coffee with her free hand and blew on the steam. “Half the people in the village were killed, and nearly all the houses burned to the ground. At least five of the theater company were killed. Two were too badly wounded to be moved. The rest fled. After the dead were buried, most of the villagers left to find shelter with friends or relations. A family who were going into the mountains took me with them as far as Leon. My parents had friends in the city. I found their house but it was empty. Later I learned that they’d fled to the north. The people I’d traveled with were already gone.”

“And you were left alone in a strange city. A fifteen-year-old child.”

A tremor ran through her. The firelight made bands of light and shadow out of the satin piping on her skirt. “I survived on the streets for a while. If you can call it surviving. I was lucky if I ate two days out of the week. I got passably good at picking pockets, but one day I was caught. My victim said I was too pretty for prison and he might be able to find me employment. I knew what he meant. To own the truth, I was relieved.”

He looked down at the hand clasped in his, the smooth rounded nails, the delicate fingers, the porcelain skin that smelled of roses and vanilla. He thought of his own childhood. His parents had been only erratic presences, and tutors and governesses had come and gone with depressing regularity. But he and his brother and sister had taken it for granted that they would always have their rambling, centuries-old house to live in, with a fire and wax candles in the schoolroom in the bargain. Whatever emotional deprivations they had suffered, they had never questioned that ample meals would be set before them each day on the second-best Spode china. “Food and a roof over your head must have seemed a promise of heaven,” he said.

“Yes.” She tried to slide her hand out of his, but he kept hold of it. “It could have been worse,” she said after a moment. “I think it was a bit cleaner than the Gilded Lily. But I’d been a better pickpocket than I was a whore. My acting skills had a tiresome tendency to desert me in the bedchamber. At least then. I was too young.”

She fell silent, her gaze frozen, as though to look at him was too great a risk, even for her. He remembered his words that morning in the Cantabrian Mountains. I’d like to kill them for you. Even that seemed inadequate now.

He lifted her hand to his lips and held it there for a moment. She turned her gaze to him and read his thoughts as she so often did. “Many women face as much and more.”

“Most of the world lives in squalor. That doesn’t lessen the horror. Or it shouldn’t.” He laced his fingers through her own. “No wonder you jumped at the chance when O’Roarke found you.”

“He was the first man in all the months I’d been in the brothel who looked at me like I was a person. It was amazingly seductive. He asked me questions about myself. He learned I’d been an actress. He talked to me about the war. After a few visits, he too offered me employment.”

“A chance at vengeance.”

“In part.” Her brows drew together, sooty smudges against her parchment-white skin. “But it’s too simple to reduce it to that. He gave me something to believe in beyond survival. He reminded me of Rousseau and Thomas Paine and William Godwin—all the ideas I’d been raised on.”

“He could hardly have turned you loose as a spy with nothing but Rousseau and Paine and Godwin to guide you.”

“Hardly. He showed me how to wield a knife and fire a gun and pick a lock. He taught me to create a cover story and stick with it. He made sure I could manage the right accent to pass myself off as a native of any part of Spain or France. He drilled me on army ranks and court protocol.” She paused a moment. “And after he took me out of the brothel, he didn’t touch me again until I asked him to.”

“If he cared a scrap for you, why the hell didn’t he—”