Secrets of a Lady (52 page)

Mélanie 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, Mélanie, 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 façade.

Raoul moved to the fireplace and stood looking down at the coals. “Mélanie, 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.”

“I rate my powers rather high,
querida
, but I didn’t begin the war. Would any purpose have been better served if I’d joined the French army and spent the war in straightforward butchery? If you’d remained in the brothel and sold your body to whichever army controlled the city?”

“We didn’t do very well as it was, Raoul. We lost.”

“We tried. That’s the most one can ask of one’s self.”

“That,” Mélanie said, “sounds exactly like something Charles might say. Only underneath he’d be cursing himself for his inability to win the war single-handed.”

Raoul’s mouth lifted in the ghost of a smile. “Then in some ways, he’s remarkably like me.”

The door opened on his last words to admit Charles and Edgar. Charles paused on the threshold and surveyed her and Raoul for a moment, then continued pulling on his gloves as though he had noticed nothing. “The carriage is ready. Shall we go?”

Chapter 33

O
n a warm spring afternoon, in an open carriage, bound for a breakfast or a fête champêtre with a basket from Fortnum & Mason tucked under the seat, the drive to Chiswick seemed to take no time. On this chill November night, in the stale air of the traveling carriage, with the prospect of seeing Carevalo at the end of it, each length of road pulled at Mélanie’s worn nerves.

Edgar settled back in his corner of the carriage. “If Carevalo’s alone in the house and we take him unawares, we might not have to give him the ring.”

“We play by the rules until we have Colin back,” Charles said. His voice left no room for discussion.

“Carevalo may not play by the rules.”

“I know. But he wants the ring. I won’t employ our bargaining chip lightly.”

“Charles, there are four of us and one of him—”

“And if we start brandishing guns about, someone’s likely to get shot. Possibly even Carevalo. He’s the only one who can take us to Colin. Until he does so, his life is more precious than our own.”

That silenced Edgar. Raoul had the sense to say nothing at all.

They stopped at an inn in the village to inquire about the exact location of the Graftons’ villa. A groom who appeared to have been dozing at his post gave them the direction willingly enough and confirmed that the Graftons had indeed departed for France and the villa was closed up.

They resumed their journey and at last pulled up at a pair of locked iron gates. One of Mélanie’s picklocks made short work of the bolts, and they wound down the oak-shaded drive. On Charles’s orders, Randall pulled up out of view of the house. They left the carriage and walked along the gravel drive on foot, by the light of the three-quarter moon and a vast scattering of stars. The villa was serene and classical in the moonlight. The walls were a brick that was probably red in the light of day, the windows framed in white. No light shone behind them.

When they reached the circular drive in front of the house, Raoul stopped and peered at the ground, still muddy from yesterday’s rain. “Fresh footprints. A man’s. And by the look of it, he wasn’t wearing laborer’s boots.”

“The two of you wait here,” Charles told Raoul and Edgar. “Keep an eye out for any unexpected arrivals. If we don’t come out in half an hour, follow us.”

Edgar made a stir of protest, but Raoul’s hand closed on his arm. “Right.”

Mélanie and Charles paused in front of the Corinthian portico, a miniaturized version of Palladian splendor. They stared up at the dark mass of the door, exchanged glances, and with one accord made their way round the side of the house. A faint light glowed in the chink between the heavy curtains of one of the ground-floor rooms. Yet more evidence that Carevalo was probably within. Her senses quickened. They stopped and studied the windows for a moment, then continued round to the back of the house.

A stirring of wind brought the damp air of the river. The moonlight shone off the smooth flagstones of the terrace. The French windows opened with the simplest pressure from one of her picklocks. They stepped onto a tiled floor and were enveloped by the smell of loamy earth and fresh flowers.

The conservatory gave onto a long, high-ceilinged hall, lit by the moonlight coming through the tall windows that flanked the front door. A wedge of light showed beneath one of the doors off the hall. As they approached it, Mélanie heard a faint scrape of metal against fabric. Charles glanced at her over his shoulder and slid his pistol from his pocket. His eyes were dark blurs in the shadowy hall, but she read the question in his gaze. She nodded.

Charles rapped at the door, a clear, distinct knock. “Carevalo? It’s the Frasers. We’ve come to negotiate, not attack. Don’t shoot before you ask questions.”

He stood still for a moment, his hand on the doorknob. Mélanie was just behind him.

“Fraser?” A voice came from the other side of the door panels, sharp with disbelief. Before, Mélanie could not have said with certainty that she could identify Carevalo’s voice, but now she recognized it without a doubt. They had found him. Relief washed over her, followed by a frisson of anticipation. “All right, come in,” Carevalo said. “But I have a pistol. No tricks.”

Charles turned the knob, pushed open the door, and stepped into the room. Mélanie followed. Lamplight and fire-warmed air spilled toward them.

The room was a library, heavy with brass and dark upholstery. Carevalo sat across from the door, sprawled in the green leather of a wing chair, a decanter at his elbow. A glass of brandy tilted between the fingers of his left hand, a pistol was clutched in his right. His slight body was relaxed, but his gaze fastened on them with the intensity of a tiger bearded in its lair.

His features were the same, but the implacable determination in his eyes transformed him. It was difficult to believe this was the same man who had paid her outrageous compliments and downed bottles of claret with the British officers in her drawing room. And yet Carevalo had always thrown himself with abandon into everything he did, be it flirtation or carousing or warfare.

Mélanie stared at the sharp-boned face of the man with whom she had flirted and danced. The man who had dined at her table and patted her children on the head. The man who had mutilated Colin. Rage such as she had never known slammed through her.

Charles closed the door. “Surprised, Carevalo? I expected a warmer greeting. I thought you’d be as eager to recover your ring as we are to give it to you.”

Fire leapt in Carevalo’s blue eyes. “You have it?”

“We have it.”

Carevalo sprang to his feet, sloshing his brandy onto the floor. “Let me see it, damn you.”

“You think I’d be fool enough to bring it with me?” Charles said, quite as if the ring wasn’t still hooked on his watch chain.

Carevalo set his brandy glass on the table beside him. His hooded eyes were red, but there was a gleam in their depths. “You think I’d be fool enough to hand over your son without seeing the ring?”

“No, I’m through with underestimating you.” Charles walked into the room, as though he hadn’t a thought for Carevalo’s pistol.

Carevalo followed him with his gaze. “So I was right. You had it all along.”

“No. We found it. Though to paraphrase Wellington, it was a damned close run thing. Not that I expect you to believe me.” Charles moved to the fireplace and leaned his arm on the mantel, as though laying claim to it. His pistol was still in his hand, resting on the plaster. “We appoint a neutral place. You bring Colin. We’ll bring the ring.”

“That could be a bluff to draw me out from under cover.”

“My dear Carevalo. If we didn’t already have the ring, we wouldn’t be wasting time with you. And if you think I’d risk a bluff with my son’s life at stake, you don’t know me.”

“If you think I’d give up my bargaining chip without proof you have the ring, you don’t know me.”

“Then it seems we have each other in check.”

Carevalo moved, so quickly that all Mélanie saw was a blur of movement, and then his pistol was pointed straight at her heart. “The ring, Fraser. Or I shoot your wife.”

In an instant, Charles had his own gun on Carevalo. “Don’t be a fool, Carevalo. Shoot Mélanie and I’ll kill you.”

“Oh no, Fraser, I don’t think so.” Carevalo’s eyes had a restless glitter, but his fingers were steady on the pistol. “You’d hardly kill the only man who can restore your son to you. Let me see the ring.”

“I told you I didn’t bring it with me. Because I feared just this scenario.”

“A good try, Fraser,” Carevalo said, his gaze trained on Mélanie. “But I don’t for a minute believe you’d trust the ring to anyone else. You have it on your person. Unless you don’t have it at all and your coming here is a bluff.” His grip on the pistol tightened.

“He’s the one who’s bluffing, Charles,” Mélanie said, though she wasn’t at all sure that this was the case. She was as conscious of the gun trained on her as if the cold metal had been pressed against her skin. “He doesn’t know you well enough to realize you’d never give way to a bluff.”