Secrets of a Lady

face. Long strands of hair hung from beneath the cap, glinting red in the faint glow of the moon. Her eyes were dark and set wide apart. Her mouth was full and looked as if it could smile. It wasn’t the sort of face that went with hitting.

“That’s more like it.” The woman pulled a flask from her pocket and unscrewed the top. “Drink this down, there’s a good boy.”

The flask had a funny, sickly smell. Colin stared at it. He wasn’t sure he could have managed to drink it if he wanted to, and he knew he didn’t want to.

“Don’t be balky, boy. There’s no time for it.” She grabbed him by the shoulders and tilted his head back. Pain lanced through his temples. He gave a cry that got clogged in his throat.

“Drink it,” the woman said again. She put the flask to his lips. “It won’t hurt, it’ll just make you fall asleep. Better than Jack hitting you again.”

The memory of Jack hitting him was enough. She tipped the flask, and Colin tried to swallow. The stuff tasted even more sickly than it smelled. He gagged, but he managed to choke some of it down.

“All right, that should do it.” The lady took the flask away. She laid him back down in the cart and pushed something under his head that felt like straw.

“Not a peep out of you, mind.” She laid the rough stuff—a burlap bag—on top of him but didn’t pull it over his face. “You’ll soon be asleep.”

He looked up at her. “Couldn’t I go home, please? I won’t tell anyone I saw you.”

The woman got to her feet and shook her head. “Sorry, lad. That would make a right mess of everything.”

The boards creaked. The lady must have climbed back onto the box.

“All right?” A man’s voice, low and rough, rose above the stillness. It had a funny lilt to it, sort of like Daddy’s but not quite.

“He’s had enough laudanum to put him out till we’re safe settled. I couldn’t risk you hitting him again or our job’d have been over before it was begun.”

“You told me to keep him quiet. What the hell’d you expect?” The cart lurched forward. “Anyway, what’s it matter if we get our money? You really think his high and mightiness means to hand the whelp back alive?”

“That’s his business.” The woman’s voice got louder, as though she’d turned her head. “But I’m not throwing away our prize chip just as the cards are dealt.”

“We’ve made our bargain. Five hundred pounds.”

“Why settle for five hundred when we could have two or three times that?”

The man gave a low chuckle. “Christ, Meg. You can still surprise me.”

“Why not? We’ve got the boy. We keep him till we get what we want. Then his lordship can do what he wants with the brat.”

Colin’s head was beginning to feel as though it were filled with cotton wool, but he tried to think past the fuzziness. They had meant to take him. It hadn’t been an accident. Someone called his lordship had paid them to take him. Mummy and Daddy knew lots of lordships. Some of them let him ride their horses and even sneaked him ices when he peered over the stair rail during parties. Some frowned when he made too much noise in the drawing room. Some ignored him. But he couldn’t think of a reason why any of them would want to steal him away from home. There was Great-Grandpapa, of course. But he would never do something so mean and anyway people called him “Your Grace” or sometimes “Duke.”

“You always know just how to handle a man, Meggie,” the man said after a moment. “One way or another.”

“Handle him?” The woman’s laugh was like the scrape of nails on a writing slate. “I’d sooner handle a snake. He’s the most dangerous man we’ve ever had dealings with, and don’t you forget it.”

“Don’t exaggerate, girl.”

“I’m not.”

“What makes him so dangerous, then?”

The lady was silent for so long that Colin didn’t think he’d be able to keep from falling asleep. When she finally spoke, it sounded as though the words were drifting down a tunnel. “Because he has nothing left to lose.”

Melanie murmured the words of a Spanish lullaby. Jessica snuggled against her, as though she could burrow into safety. Her hand was fisted round the falling collar of Melanie’s gown, but she was losing the fight against sleep. Berowne sat washing himself on the bed beside them. The harmless, necessary cat. Perhaps he knew that the sight of him smoothing his soft gray fur and rubbing his ears was the best comfort he could offer.

Melanie’s gaze drifted over the room. Her lip-rouge-stained glass of whisky stood abandoned on the dressing table beside the rouge pots and perfume flasks and jewel boxes. Her throat closed at the sight. Little more than an hour ago, she and Charles had been laughing in this room in blithe unconcern. Little more than an hour before that she had been fending off the Marques de Carevalo’s attentions and eating overrich lobster patties, as though this night were no different from any other.

Colin, her son, was missing, taken from his bedchamber and spirited into the dark London night. The knowledge reverberated through her with a force that bone and muscle could scarcely contain.

Logic said that whoever had taken Colin was long gone and the best way to help him was to wait for the Bow Street officers, but her body screamed with the impulse to run from the house and scour the streets of Mayfair shouting her son’s name.

Yet beneath the fear and disbelief, guilt twisted her guts. She had thought she was safe in this beautiful house, with her beautiful children and her brilliant if self-contained husband. She had thought she had put the past behind her. There were moments when she had feared otherwise, when she had known that one couldn’t separate what one had been from what one was now and what one would become. But never, sacrebleu, never, had she thought her children would pay for her crimes.

Jessica made a protesting sound. Melanie willed the tension from her arms. Was that why Colin had been taken? Because of who his mother was? She could not make sense of it, yet the fear that it was true gnawed at her insides.

The knife’s edge on which she had balanced for so many years turned inward, slashing through elaborate layers of defense and pretense, laying bare the cold, hard fear that had always lurked at the heart of her marriage. Should she tell Charles the whole? Would the truth serve any purpose? Or would it merely smash their marriage to bits without doing Colin any good?

“Mel.” Her husband’s voice came from the doorway.

She jerked her head up. She looked into the deep-set gray eyes that could see so much and yet from which she had kept her deepest secrets hidden for seven years. For a moment, she doubted her own ability to dissemble.

“The Bow Street officers are here,” Charles said. “They’ve gone outside to look at the garden. They made it clear I wasn’t to get in the way. Since I’d already drawn my own conclusions, I left them to see if they come up with anything different.” His mouth hardened, and she could feel the need for action rippling through him. He walked toward the bed. “Jessica asleep?”

She was, Melanie realized. Her head had flopped against Melanie’s arm, and her breathing was deep and even. “At last. I think she should stay in here. The Bow Street men will want to go through the nursery rooms.”

Charles turned back the covers. Melanie uncurled Jessica’s fingers from the collar of her gown and laid her on the Irish linen sheet. Jessica stirred but didn’t open her eyes.

Melanie straightened up to find Charles looking down at their daughter, his face knit in a fierce combination of love and fear and rage. She touched his arm. “She was asking for Colin. She knows something’s wrong. We’ll have to find a way to explain.”

He nodded, the muscles in his arm bunched tight beneath her fingers. She studied his face. His hair was damp and he had got a smudge of soot on his cheek, marks of the investigating he had done himself while they waited for Bow Street. “What conclusions did you draw?” she said.

He lifted his gaze to her. “I couldn’t find anything outside, except the footprints in the primrose bed. There