The Mask of Night (24 page)

She swallowed. “Yes. In Vienna he never gave any indication he suspected I was more than a British diplomat’s wife. But in Paris I realized he knew the truth. He assured me he had no reason to reveal it.”

Charles saw Talleyrand’s shrewd face clear in his mind’s eye for a moment. Another man he’d known since boyhood. Another man who had known the truth about his wife long before he did himself. “Whatever his connection to St. Juste, Talleyrand was right about one thing. I don't for a moment believe it was a coincidence that St. Juste seduced Lord Carfax's daughter.” He crossed to the high-backed chair beside the fireplace and leaned his arms along its back. "Tell me about Bel."

A shadow crossed Mélanie's face, but she was too professional to hesitate. She sat on the sofa opposite him and recounted her interviews with Sylvie St. Ives and Oliver and finally Isobel's revelations about her affair with Julien St. Juste.

"I should have questioned her further, but I don't think I'd have got anything from her at that point, and I was half in shock myself.” She pressed her hands over her lap. "All these months—all these years. I see her practically every day, and I never guessed something was amiss with her marriage.”

“I see you every day, and I never guessed you were a French agent.”

“Yes, but—“

"It offends your professional pride that a rank amateur could practice deception so skillfully?”

“No, of course not. Yes, I suppose so. A bit.” She stared at him, the angles of her face sharpened by the candlelight. “You don’t seem as surprised as I am.”

“If I hadn't already realized that few people are what they seem on the surface, you certainly opened my eyes.”

“Don’t tell me you
knew
—“

“That Isobel was having an affair with Julien St. Juste? Good God, no. That her and Oliver's marriage was less than idyllic? Most marriages are."

“When I first met them— They seemed so complete. You know, darling, I have the most beastly sense I didn’t
want
to see anything wrong between them. I wanted to believe marriage could be as simple and comfortable as theirs seemed. Don’t look at me like that, Charles, you know I love you but even the wildest optimist couldn’t call our marriage simple and there certainly as times it isn't comfortable.”

“There’s a lot to be said for complexity and—“

“Discomfort?”

“I was going to say ‘challenge.’”

She gave a faint smile. "Does Oliver have mistresses?”

“I've never asked him, and he's never confided in me. But I confess I've wondered. He’s always been flirtatious.”

“Why the devil didn’t you—“

“Do something? It’s not my business to interfere in other people’s lives. Say something? I didn’t know anything for a fact. I don’t think you and I’ve ever had a conversation about Isobel and Oliver’s marriage.”

“Because I never thought there was anything to discuss. I can’t believe—“

“That I saw something you didn’t?”

“I— Damn it, yes.”

He looked into the baffled gaze of his wife, the clear-eyed, unromantic realist who had entered into their own marriage for the most calculated of reasons. In theory. “Perhaps it’s a question of expectations. I don’t assume the fact that people appear content means they’re happy with their lot.”

“And you think I do? For God’s sake, Charles.”

“I think you’ve always been better able to believe in the possibility of happiness than I am.”

"But surely when they first married—"

"They intended to be faithful? You didn’t intend to be faithful when you married me."

She regarded him with that scouring honesty with which she confronted uncomfortable questions. “No, I didn’t. But then I’d never hold my own behavior up as a model of anything.” She smoothed a crease from her skirt. “Did you? Intend to be faithful?”

“Yes, as it happens. But it was hardly as though I had a very active career to abandon.”

“And you take your promises seriously.” In the warm wash of candlelight, Mélanie’s gaze had the bruised look he remembered from last night. “Fidelity hasn't been a word in my vocabulary for a long time. It might have been once. When I was a girl playing Juliet in my father’s theatre company. Before—”

“Everything else.” Before she’d been raped by a gang of British soldiers, seen her father and sister killed, been left penniless and homeless.

“Being raped was the least of it,” she said, in the low, rough voice he’d learned to recognize from moments when she dredged up long-buried truths. “I could have got past that, I think. It was losing everyone I cared about, fighting for survival. I had to claw my way back to a sense of purpose. When I did, so much I’d used to value didn’t make sense anymore."

“There’s more than one kind of fidelity, Mel. You’ve been remarkably faithful to a number of things.”

Her gaze fastened on his face. “Charles, you know that I—“

He looked into the scarred, beautiful eyes from which he’d never been able to hide things. He found he didn’t want a declaration based on duty or guilt. “I know you,” he said. He spread his hands over the cool damask of the chair back. "The pertinent fact for the moment is that Bel's lover was Julien St. Juste.”

Something flashed in Mélanie's gaze, but she merely said, "Which brings us back to what St. Juste was doing in England."

"Quite. Of course, it's always possible that whoever killed him didn't have the least idea of his real identity."

The candlelight seemed to jump in Mélanie's eyes. “Charles—“

“You needn't coddle me. I can handle suspecting my friends.”

"They're my friends too."

He stared into the unlit fireplace, remembering the moment Mélanie had told him she was a French spy, remembering how close to violence he’d been. “Oliver has a temper. And he’s handy with his fives and a skilled fencer. Not a match for a trained assassin, but—“

“If something happened to give him an edge, if he was angry enough—”

“Whatever one’s own behavior, one’s spouse’s infidelity can be difficult to accept.”

She shot a sharp look at him. “So can learning a man has seduced one’s daughter. Or sister.”

“Yes. It gives Carfax and David motives as well. And then there’s Isobel.”

“You mean if she and St. Juste quarreled? Or she feared he’d reveal the truth to Oliver?”

“Or she learned who he was. She was remarkably cool-headed last night for a woman’s who’s just seen her lover’s corpse.”

"Charles, we're talking about Bel."

"So we are. I'm endeavoring to be detached. If—"

A rap on the library door cut his words short. "Lord Worlsey and Lady Lucinda," Michael announced.

David strode into the room, his mouth compressed into a hard line. Charles had known that look from their days at Harrow when David was trying to hold strong emotion at bay. Lucinda walked with quick, jerky steps at her brother's side.

"I'm sorry.” David looked from Charles to Mélanie. "But Lucy overheard something that I think you should hear."

Lucinda tugged off her brown velvet bonnet. "I wasn't eavesdropping. That is, not on purpose—"

"Of course not.” Mélanie drew her to the sofa.

"I couldn't work out what I should do. So I went to David, and he said—" Lucinda cast an anxious glance at her brother. David nodded. "Bel was with Mama this afternoon." Lucinda pulled off her gloves and bunched them up in her lap. "I was sitting with them, when Rufus—Mama's pug—got out of boudoir. I chased him into the library. The study door must have been ajar, because that's when I heard them."

"Them?" Charles pressed a glass of sherry into her hand.

"Papa and— I'm not sure who the other man was. It was harder to make out his voice.” Lucinda looked up at Charles, took a quick gulp of sherry, lifted her gaze to Charles again. "Papa was saying that it was important to keep an eye on you. I mean on Charles Fraser."

Charles turned from handing a sherry to David. "You heard my name?"

"Oh, yes. I head Papa say 'I want Fraser watched. I need to know what he discovers. Preferably before he discovers it himself.'"

A dozen quarrels with his former spymaster shot through Charles's mind. Along with the memory of a warm clasp on the shoulder. "And?" he asked.

"I couldn't hear all the words, but I think the other man asked why Papa asked you—you, Charles, that is—to investigate in the first place. Papa said it was unavoidable. And then—” She flushed.

"I don’t bruise easily," Charles said.

"Papa said, 'Fraser can prove useful. Provided one keeps him under control.' The other man murmured something about 'Tired of doing your dirty work.'"

Charles dropped into a chair opposite her. "I see."

"I was so shocked when I first heard them that I couldn't move for a bit. Then—well yes, I was trying to hear more so I could make sense of it. Only Rufus started to squirm—I was holding him—so I had to go back upstairs."

Mélanie squeezed Lucinda's hand. Lucinda looked from Charles to her brother. "I couldn't talk to Bel in front of Mama, and anyway it was really David's advice I wanted, so I slipped out and walked round to the Albany. But Marston told me David had gone to Bel's, so I walked to St. James’s Place and found him there. He said we needed to tell you."

"That was brave of you, Lucy," Charles said.

Lucinda stared at the creased ball she'd made of her doeskin gloves. "I know you, Charles. I know you wouldn't— Of course, I know Papa too. That is I should. But—"

"Knowing one's parents can be difficult. And your father's been gone much of the time."

Lucinda gave a jerky nod, fingers twisting round the sherry glass.

David touched his sister on the shoulder. "Lucy, perhaps you'd like to go up and see Colin and Jessica?"

"You want to talk to Charles and Mélanie alone?"

"I'm afraid I should."

"I understand.” Lucinda's gaze swept the three of them. "There's an explanation, isn't there?"

"I'm sure there is," Charles said.

"But not necessarily a comfortable one."

"Not necessarily," Charles agreed.

Lucinda picked up her bonnet and smoothed out her gloves. "Thank you for being honest”

David stared at the door as it closed behind his sister, then turned to Charles. "You don't seem surprised."

"Your father trying to manipulate me isn't exactly cause for shock," Charles said, swallowing the acrid taste at the back of his mouth. "He sees all his agents at chess pieces. Any good spymaster would."

"But why did he ask you to investigate at all?" Mélanie asked.

"He probably realized Castlereagh would suggest it if he didn't himself. Besides, from what Lucinda overheard he seems to think I can be useful uncovering information."

"Just not all of it," David said.

"St. Juste had worked for your father. Carfax may be afraid of what I might find in St. Juste's papers. The most routine spy mission is bound to have its unsavory side. I learned that before I'd worked for your father a year."

"That's what doesn't make sense," Mélanie said.

"Darling?"

"Carfax must know you're a realist about the spy game. So what was he afraid of you discovering?"

"Quite. I think was more personal.” David stared at his sherry glass, then crossed to the drinks trolley and splashed whisky into a fresh glass. "I think Father was afraid you'd learn about St. Juste and Bel."

The words hung in the air like a pistol shot. In twenty-some years of shared confidences, Charles had never heard quite that edge in David's voice. "How long have you known?" he asked.

David tossed back a long draught of whisky. "I got to St. James’s Place just after Mélanie left. Bel told me. She said the truth was bound to come out now, and she rather I heard it from her.” His fingers whitened round the glass. “Damn him.”

“St. Juste?” Mélanie asked.

“Oliver.”

Mélanie went to him and laid her hand on his arm. “She’s obviously been dreadfully unhappy. I’ve been kicking myself for not noticing. But it’s folly to apportion blame when we can only observe the situation from the outside.”

“She’s my sister.” David jerked away from her grip. “I know enough to know she’d never have done this if Oliver hadn’t driven her beyond endurance. I would have asked her more, but she didn't want to talk beyond the bare details, and then Lucinda arrived.” He took a turn about the room. "If Father had learned of the affair—"

"It's possible," Charles said. "Talleyrand had got wind of it in France. At least that's what the Comte de Flahaut says. Flahaut was trying to follow St. Juste."

David stopped and stared at him. "Good God, how many people knew about my sister's indiscretion?"

"Surely if Lord Carfax knew about the affair," Mélanie said, "he'd be more likely to trust Charles with Bel's secrets than this nameless man Lucinda overheard him with."

"That depends on who the nameless man was.” Charles kept his gaze on David. "And perhaps on exactly what Carfax knew about the affair."

David returned his gaze. "You think Father killed St. Juste."

"I don't think it likely, but this does give him a motive."

"And Oliver. And me."

"You don’t have the temperament of a killer, David."

"You're always saying you never the lengths to which people will go in the right circumstances.” David pressed his hand over his eyes. "Why? Why would St. Juste seduce Bel? She's closer to Father than any of us, but I'd stake my life he doesn't confide state secrets to her."

"St. Juste may have thought he could use the affair as leverage against Carfax."

"
God in heaven
."

Charles moved to the table and picked the papers he'd brought back from Rosemary Lane. "Roth and I found St. Juste's lodgings today. We surprised someone in the act of searching."

"You think that person was sent by my father?"

"It would make sense."

Mélanie moved to stand beside Charles and studied the coded papers. "You've tried to break these?"

"I'm almost positive they're book codes. I brought the books we found in St. Juste's rooms, but I doubt he'd have left the code book so conveniently to hand."

"Did you find anything else in his rooms?"

“Some bags of powders I suspect are poisons. And this, though I’m not sure what to make of it.” Charles pulled the glued together sheet and St. Juste's decoded version from his coat. "Roth and I wondered if they could be drop dates."