Beneath a Silent Moon (3 page)

Intimacy pulsed through the air. Mélanie knew with absolute certainty that something had passed between her husband and Honoria Talbot. Images raced across her mind. Fingers twining together. A hand brushing tousled hair. Lips against a hand, a cheek, a forehead. A mouth claiming another.

She turned away, betraying tears stinging her blackened lashes, and cursed herself for a bloody fool.

Gisèle ducked into an alcove on the edge of the dance floor and tugged at the folds of her blond lace scarf, which had become hopelessly twisted. She never could get it to lie smooth, the way some women did. Women like Honoria Talbot and Charles's intimidatingly lovely foreign-born wife.

She'd very nearly made a hideous mistake with Evie just now and told her things she had no business revealing. It was difficult, keeping secrets all the time. How on earth had Charles managed when he was having adventures on the Peninsula and no doubt telling lies to everyone he met? Just one evening of pretending to feel and think things that were alien to her left her with a pounding headache and a hollow ache in the pit of her stomach.

Or perhaps that was the number of glasses of champagne she'd swallowed. It had seemed to help at the time, but now she felt the alcohol churning in her insides. She pressed her face against the cool plaster of a convenient pillar.

Picking her way through the tangle of people and relationships at Glenister House was as difficult as negotiating the yew hedge maze on her grandfather's Irish estate. But tonight she'd swear there was something more. Some tension she couldn't explain rippling beneath the polished surface of the evening, pressing against the candle-warmed air like the heaviness that warns of a thunderstorm about to break.

A man lurched into the alcove, shoes thudding unsteadily against the marble floor. Gisèle drew back against the pillar. The man clutched a potted palm. "Sorry," he muttered, "I didn't—oh. It's you, Gelly."

His voice was thickened and his face shadowed, but Gisèle recognized William Talbot, Earl Quentin, Lord Glenister's elder son. "Hullo, Quen," she said, stepping away from the pillar.

"Hiding from the gorgons, child?" Quen's eyes glittered in the shadows. He always seemed one step short of punching his fist through a window.

"Only trying to recover my defenses." Gisèle peered at him. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but his face looked green. "Are you all right?"

He gave a strangled laugh. " 'All right' is a relative term, but I assure you I'm perfectly—" His face turned chartreuse. "Oh, Christ, I'm not. Profoundest apologies." He pushed past her and proceeded to be sick into the potted palm.

The smell nearly made her vomit herself. Her instinct was to run, but the memory of the boy who'd rescued her favorite doll from the duck pond made her stand her ground. She put a tentative hand on his back. He was shuddering as though he had the fever. "It's the champagne," she said. "I don't feel very well myself."

"It's the champagne and the claret and the brandy and all the damn—" He retched again.

"There you are, Gelly, thank goodness, I've—" Evie swept into the alcove and went stock still. "Oh, Quen, you're foxed."

"I should think so." He straightened up, gripping the palm tree for support. "How else am I supposed to get through a family party?"

Evie tugged a handkerchief from her puffed sleeve and wiped his mouth. "You couldn't have waited until afterward?"

"After—oh, right. Forgot this is an important night."

Gisèle looked from one to the other. "Important how?"

Quen stared at her with eyes that suddenly seemed to focus. "Lord, infant, they haven't told you?"

Something in his gaze made Gisèle go as cold as if a champagne bucket of ice had been dumped over her head. "Told me what?"

"Oh, God, you'll never—" Another spasm of retching brought him to his knees.

Evie bent over her cousin, arms round his shoulders. "Gelly, could you find one of the footmen and ask him to have coffee sent into the book room as soon as possible?"

"But what—"

"Quen doesn't know what he's saying.
Please
, Gelly."

Gisèle fled.

Mélanie held the spider-gauze skirt of her gown in one hand and gripped her beaded lace shawl taut with the other to prevent telltale rustling as she retreated along the mirror-hung corridor. Mercifully, the thin soles of her satin slippers made barely a whisper of sound on the oak floorboards.

Her mind went back to an airless sitting room in the British Embassy in Lisbon, choked with the heat of a December fire. The embassy chaplain, hurrying through the wedding service with the speed of one eager for his dinner. Charles's firm, level voice as he repeated his marriage vows, his fingers steady on her own as he slid the hastily purchased gold band onto her finger, his hand neat and even when he signed his name to the marriage lines.

Their marriage had begun in a crucible of war and personal turmoil. Even now she could not be entirely sure of his reasons for offering for her. And God knew her own reasons for entering into the marriage had been less than pure.

In Lisbon and war-torn Spain, in the thickly layered intrigue of the Congress of Vienna, in Brussels before Waterloo and Paris afterward, they had been consumed by the needs of the moment. To think of the future, let alone plan for it, had been an impossible luxury. As for the past, it had been a minefield round which they'd both learned to tread with caution, respecting each other's scars. Charles had volunteered little more than cursory details about his family and friends and childhood. With more than enough reasons to avoid discussing her own past, she hadn't pressed him.

But now they had stepped back into the warp and weft of Charles's old life. The life of a man who was grandson to a duke, educated at Harrow and Oxford, connected to half the noble families in England and Scotland. A life of alliances stretching back generations, of unwritten rules and uncrossable boundaries. A life that Honoria Talbot exemplified. A life to which Mélanie was alien in every sense of the word.

Without Charles, she would be alone in this strange world. She needed him, she who had once prided herself on not needing anyone. Words like
love
belonged to fairy tales and lending library novels and balconies in Verona. Was it folly to want to believe that something more than desperation and chivalry, physical need and yellowed marriage lines bound them together?

A laugh sounded from one of the anterooms off the corridor, followed by a stir of fabric and a furtive sigh that was unmistakable in its implications. Some of the guests had stolen away from the ball for reasons other than talk. Mélanie hurried on and then realized she should have reached the ballroom by now. She must have taken a wrong turn in the maze of corridors. A faint whisper of music drifted through the air, but she wasn't sure of the direction.

"Don't tell me my son has abandoned you. I'd say I thought I'd raised him better, but I'm afraid I can take little credit or blame for his upbringing."

Her father-in-law, Kenneth Fraser, stood ten paces away. He must have emerged from one of the rooms that lined the corridor, though she hadn't heard any sound until he spoke.

The cold glass of the mirrors that lined the corridor threw their reflections back at them—a black-coated man with graying hair and a bearing that radiated power, a pale, dark-haired woman in a silver dress. Fraser's fine-featured face was set with its habitual mask of sardonic amusement. One of the tapers in the sconces on the left wall had gone out, leaving him half in light, half in shadow. Fitting. In a fanciful mood, she'd have called him equal parts Sun King and Prince of Darkness.

"I may be new to London society, Mr. Fraser," she said, "but I know very well that a husband and wife are not expected to live in each other's pockets."

"To say the least. I'll wager there's more intrigue at a London ball than you've found in all your years in Continental diplomatic circles." His gaze seemed to slice through the gauze and satin of her gown and the linen of her chemise to expose the flesh beneath. "You've learned the ways of London society very quickly, my dear. You have the look of a daughter of the game."

She lifted her chin a fraction of an inch but otherwise held herself still. "What game is that, Mr. Fraser?"

"The oldest game of all, Mélanie. And the most enjoyable." He strolled toward her with the easy confidence of a roue striding across a courtesan's boudoir. "I'm sure you have all the requisite talents to excel at it. You're obviously an excellent actress. You play the devoted wife to perfection."

She gave him a smile designed to be as hard and brilliant as the mirrors. "That depends on whether or not one considers it acting to portray the truth convincingly."

"You see what I mean? You're superb." He offered her his arm. "May I escort you back to the ballroom? It's a sad shame for you to hide yourself away from your admirers."

She didn't allow herself to hesitate before she set her ivory-silk-gloved fingers lightly on the black superfine of his sleeve. They walked a few paces down the corridor in silence.

"I'd give a great deal to know why you married him," Fraser said.

"If you have to ask that, Mr. Fraser, you don't know your son."

"Ah, mere you speak the truth, my dear. And I know you even less. But then in the final analysis, who's to say why anyone chooses a marriage partner? Often even the person's spouse is quite in ignorance."

"Oh, Mr. Fraser," Mélanie said. "Sometimes ignorance is bliss."

"One must find bliss in marriage somehow." His gaze drifted over her face and throat and settled on a point just above the twists of silver satin at the neck, of her gown. She felt it like a rapier point against her skin. "I advise you to remain in the ballroom, my dear. I think you'll find the events that are about to transpire to be of interest."

They stepped through a blue damask draped archway into a long, barrel-ceilinged white-and-gold chamber. The room was an assault on the senses. The brilliance of burning wax tapers and sparkling crystals, the lively melody of a country dance, the smell of perfumes and oils and fresh-cut flowers.

Gauzy pastel gowns, feathered headdresses, ringleted hair, and sober coats of coal black and midnight blue swirled on the dance floor. Strange to see so few redcoated officers, riflemen in green, staff officers in sky blue. Mélanie was reminded, with a jolt that was almost physical, that she was no longer in Lisbon or Vienna or Brussels or Paris. The war was over and danger had supposedly been left behind on the Continent. This unfamiliar world was home now. It was supposed to be safe. Though holding her father-in-law's arm, she didn't feel safe.

The Marquis of Glenister, Honoria Talbot's uncle, was leaning against one of the columns on the gallery that ran round the top of the ballroom. His silver-streaked dark head was bent close to that of a fair-haired lady in a peach gown who was young enough to be his daughter. Lord Glenister and Kenneth Fraser had been friends since their school days at Harrow and were said to have shared every manner of debauchery. According to rumor, Glenister had once bought a mistress from Kenneth Fraser for the sum of five thousand pounds. The lady and her husband were said to have been witnesses to the contract.