Secrets of a Lady

such a black-and-white sound, doesn’t it?” His fingers drifted over the squares of the chessboard. “But like most things, it really isn’t anything of the sort. Betrayal of a country, an ideal, a lover, a spouse, a friend. It’s often impossible to be loyal to all. Which loyalty comes first?”

She glanced at the Siena marble table, the Aubusson carpet, the silver candlesticks, the intricate fretwork on the walls. “I claim to believe in liberty, equality, and fraternity. And I live here.”

“A point. Though judging by those of Charles’s speeches I’ve read, his political ideals are remarkably similar to yours. Or mine, for that matter.”

“That’s true. And he wouldn’t let them be compromised by the challenge of a game.”

“He moves in a different world than we did. He plays within the system, which can be damnably difficult when the system itself is corrupt.”

“But at least it doesn’t force him to hide in the shadows.”

“You’ve hardly been hiding in the shadows these past years, querida.” Raoul watched her with a faint smile. “You help write his speeches, don’t you?”

“Is my style so obvious?”

“Only to someone who knows you.”

“Charles helps me when I address a public meeting or write a pamphlet. We—work well together.” The words seemed pathetically inadequate to describe the melding of minds that their marriage could be. “I’ve never tried to influence him to say anything he didn’t believe in. Nor has he with me.”

“No, that would be out of character for both of you.” Raoul was still watching her steadily.

She looked into his smiling, unreadable gaze. “You’ve followed Charles’s career more closely than I realized.”

“I could hardly fail to be interested.” He paused a moment. “I must admit that when I read his speeches I’m conscious of a pride I have no right to feel.”

“How could you bear it?” she said, thinking of Charles and Colin and what he had and hadn’t been to both of them. “You gave up both your sons.”

The smile faded from his eyes, replaced by the blankness of emotion held in check. “I was scarcely in a position to do much for either one of them.”

“Did it never occur to you that they might need you?”

His mouth twisted. “I don’t think I’d have made much of a father, querida. Colin has a far better one.”

“Charles didn’t.”

“No. Charles’s childhood was—unfortunate. I did try—When he was a boy, when I was still in Ireland, I spent time with him when I could, without rousing suspicions. But then after the Irish uprising it was a long time before I could comfortably go back to Britain.” He paused and drew a breath that did not sound entirely even. “His mother would send me news of him from time to time. I confess—I missed him more than I would have expected.”

Melanie stared at him. At nineteen, she had been arrogantly confident that she understood him. Now she wondered if she had known him at all. “The lock of hair,” she said. “The lock of blond hair you keep in your watch fob. For a moment I thought it might be Elizabeth Fraser’s. But it isn’t a woman’s at all, is it? It’s Charles’s baby hair.”

Raoul returned her gaze, though she sensed he wanted nothing so much as to look away from her. “What a dreadfully sentimental thought.”

She took a step toward him. “If you owe me nothing else, you owe me an honest answer. We’re talking about my husband. It’s Charles’s, isn’t it?”

Raoul drew another harsh breath, then released it. “Elizabeth sent the lock of hair to me just after his first birthday. It’s hardly the sort of thing I could fail to keep.”

“You could have tucked it away in a drawer somewhere. Instead you carried it with you. Because—”

He continued to watch her. She would swear his color had deepened. “I may not have your parental instincts, Melanie, but I’m not wholly devoid of them.”

She remembered, in a moment of foolishness after Colin’s birth, asking Raoul if he wanted to see the baby. Raoul had said No, I think I’d better not in the sort of detached voice that, now she thought about it, was just like Charles’s when he most wanted to hide his feelings. Later Raoul had seen Colin at a reception she and Charles gave in Lisbon. He looked at the child with the same carefully blank expression she had seen on his face a few moments ago. “That’s why you never wanted to see Colin, isn’t it? Not because you didn’t care, but because you were afraid of caring too much. Because in your own way you’d done your damnedest to be a parent to Charles and you knew how much loving a child can hurt.”

“Colin didn’t need another parent. Charles did.”

“And yet when you saw Charles again in Lisbon—”

A shade closed over the pain in his eyes. “He was a grown man and we were on opposite sides.”

She held him with her gaze, refusing to have her questions turned away. “You sent me after the ring knowing I’d meet your son. Did you expect me to seduce him?”

“I never asked you how you got your information. Though seduction would have been at odds with the role you were playing on that mission.”

“Damn you.” She whirled away from him, then turned back and said with reckless defiance, “Charles is mad enough to think you’re in love with me.”

Raoul went still for the length of a musket shot. “I told you he was a sensible man.”

She tried to swallow and found her throat constricted. “You never said it.”

“Don’t you go sentimental on me, querida. You never needed words to know what I was thinking or feeling.”

Her fingers closed on her arms, pressing through the merino of her gown. “I never had time to pay much attention to my own feelings, let alone anyone else’s.”

“Precisely.” He moved toward her, then checked himself a few feet off. She knew only one other pair of eyes that could be at once so cool and so intense. “Long before I met you I’d decided where my greatest loyalty lay. I consider regrets a singular waste of time. That doesn’t mean I don’t have them. But any good chess player knows one can’t change one’s mind after a piece is moved.” His gaze moved over her face. She felt it like a caress. “I remember when I realized I’d lost you. No, that’s melodramatic and unfair. You were never mine to lose. But I remember when I realized things would never be the same between us. You hadn’t been married long. We met in a park in Lisbon on a miserably cold January afternoon. You said—”

“That it wasn’t at all like I expected and I couldn’t control him.” It was what she had lain in bed thinking on her wedding night, while Charles slept in her arms. She’d known that he had a quick wit she admired, a keen mind that could prove dangerous, an integrity that put her to shame. But she hadn’t guessed at the emotional depths that lay beneath the cool, controlled facade.

Raoul moved to the fireplace and stood looking down at the coals. “Melanie, if worst does come to worst —”

“You’d take me back?” She gave the words a bitter twist.

He looked at her over his shoulder. “I won’t insult either you or myself by taking that seriously. But I would make sure you and your children were never in want. I owe you that, at least.”

“Easing your conscience?”

“Say, rather, settling an old debt. Before today I’d have said that under the same circumstances you’d do as much for me.”

“That might still be true.” She watched his face in the firelight. She wondered how such a tumult of conflicting feelings could coexist inside her. “Raoul? Do you ever wonder if we were wrong?”

He smiled. “Oh, my darling girl. I rarely sleep well. As you know better than anyone.”

“Did you ever think about—”

“Giving it up? Walking away from the game? Yes, as a matter of fact. When you told me you were pregnant.”

She sucked in her breath and put a hand on a chair back to steady herself.

He continued to regard her with a steady gaze. “But in the end my love of the game was too strong. Or my belief in the cause. Or both.”

“Perhaps we never should have begun the game in the first place.”