The Mask of Night (47 page)

David stared at his lover for a moment. “I haven’t thought I had any choice for years. I suppose— It hardly matters. I don’t have a choice once again.”

“Bel.“ Charles leaned toward her. “Did St. Juste say anything to you that you can put a meaning to in hindsight?”

Isobel frowned, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, Charles. I still can’t believe Gerard—St. Juste—was Arthur, and I didn’t— He seemed so completely who he was. Who he told me he was.”

“He had a knack for that,” Mélanie said.

“Whatever he was doing,” David said, “why—“

“Seduce me.“ Isobel tossed down a long swallow of whisky.

“Suppose he’d come to England do a job and was trying to decide whether or not to reclaim his heritage,” Simon said.

“You mean he was just using me to spy on his old life?” Isobel asked.

“For better or worse you are his family.”

Isobel pulled her shawl close about her shoulders. “What now?”

“We need to talk to Lady Pendarves,” Charles said. “To see if she saw anything in the garden. And to St. Ives and Pendarves to see if they know more about Arthur.”

“And Mr. O’Roarke?”

Charles glanced at his wife. He could feel the need for action radiating from her still form. “Our best chance of finding him is to discover what Arthur was doing in England and who knew about it.”

“You knew him, didn’t you?” Isobel said. “Mr. O’Roarke, I mean. When you were a child.”

“Yes.“ Charles set down his whisky glass. “He was a friend of the family.”

“I only met him once or twice,” David said. “But I remember he had an uncanny knack for knowing how to talk to children.”

“He has a talent for knowing how to talk to most people.“ Simon was watching Mélanie with an appraising gaze. “We should leave. You must be exhausted.”

“I think we’re beyond that,” Mélanie said, but the gathering broke up in any case. Isobel had her carriage and offered to drop Roth at his house and Simon and David at the Albany.

"It would be easier," Charles said to Mélanie as he closed the front door behind their friends, "if more people were in possession of the same version of facts."

Mélanie took a candle from the console table. "At least now Roth knows what we know."

"That was a risk."

"What in our life isn't?"

He snapped the bolts shut on the door. “We can’t do anything until morning,”

“No,” she agreed.

They climbed the stairs to their bedchamber in silence. Mélanie crossed to her dressing table and began to unbutton her jet-beaded cuffs with a methodical precision that indicated intense effort.

“I know you want to be doing something,” Charles said, “but we barely got any sleep last night—“

“Don’t try to mother me, Charles. I've got by perfectly well without a mother since I was seven.”

“There’s a good chance O'Roarke’s still alive, Mel.”

She started on her second cuff. “It’s hardly the first time I’ve faced the possibility that Raoul might be dead. He knew it was dangerous or he wouldn’t have—”

“Said goodbye to Colin.”

She met his gaze across the room. “Yes.”

“You don’t have to pretend,” he said. “We’re supposed to be honest with each other now.”

She gave a smile that trembled about her eyes. “As honest as the other one can handle.”

“I can handle this.“ And yet he could not help but wonder at the host of memories lay behind the fear in his wife’s eyes. She and O’Roarke had shared a bed, but that, perhaps, had been the least of it. O’Roarke, she had once said, had given her a sense of purpose. He had taught her to fight and pick locks and maintain a cover story. They had strategized missions, decoded documents, shared morning coffee in Spanish mountain camps, confessed dreams and regrets over late-night glasses of wine.

He watched her, seeking clues to a part of her life he hadn’t known existed until two months ago. Yet the image that came to his mind was of himself as a nine-year-old boy, walking along a stream on his grandfather’s Irish estate with the tall man who was one of the few adults to always show him interest and understanding. He heard his own young voice asking But which side is right? King Henry and Prince Hal or the rebels? And O’Roarke replying, with a quick smile and a gaze that always challenged but never mocked, Good question. What do you think?

Mélanie pushed back her sheer net sleeve and touched the scar on the inside of her wrist. She’d told him she’d received it when she’d been masquerading as a peasant girl to get information from a group of Spanish bandits. “When I got this—I’d been stupid. I shouldn’t have been caught. I was over confident and I pushed things too far. But then that was always a risk.”

“O’Roarke got you out.”

"Logically he should have left me there. I could have held out long enough for him to cover for any information I might have let slip. There’s even a chance I could have got away. Though looking back I doubt it. But he risked three other men getting me out. When I asked him if he was afraid I’d break, he said no he was afraid I’d hold out so long they’d kill me. I told him he was a fool, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see anyone in my life.“ She gripped her elbows. “If he’s alive, I need to find him, Charles. I owe it to him. I think I owe it to myself.”

“Of course,” Charles said.

The funny thing about honesty was that it had a way of ringing true, like sterling.

And like a silver dagger it could cut straight to the bone.

Chapter 32

It is done. Madame Souza left this morning with the baby and the wet nurse, whom St. Juste fetched from the Iles Borromées. Hortense insisted on coming down stairs and seeing them off. She kissed the baby's head and put him in the nurse's arms herself. Flahaut stood with his arm round her as the carriage rolled over the paving stones and vanished from sight. I found my cheeks damp—and you know I never cry. Hortense was dry-eyed, as though she'd already cried all her tears and had none left.

Mélanie Lescaut to Raoul O'Roarke

Saint-Maurice-en-Valais

21 September 1811

Saint-Maurice-en-Valais

September, 1811

Mélanie sat on the riverbank, arms linked about her muslin covered knees, sketchbook and pencil abandoned beside her. She closed her eyes and pushed her bonnet back from her forehead. The autumn sun beat down warm on her face and the river rushed by clean and cool below her. Difficult on a day like this to believe that winter was not far off. And that a little boy would spend his first Christmas without either of his parents present.

"Seeking solace in nature? How Wordsworthian. Though there are other ways we could have found solace on this journey. I have quite agreeable memories of two years ago."

She opened her eyes and bit back a curse. She should have heard him long before he spoke. "Two years ago was work."

St. Juste dropped down beside her, arms hooked round one knee, his other leg dangling over the bank. "Meaning you don't indulge outside of business?"

"Meaning I'm rather fastidious about whom I indulge with."

"Fair enough.“ He pulled a silver flask from his coat. "Thought perhaps you could do with this."

"Am I so obvious?"

"The press of emotions in the inn was a bit thick even for me."

Mélanie accepted the flask and took a swallow. "How was she when you left?"

"Quiet. Flahaut was the one who looked as if he was going to be sick."

"It's his baby too."

"And unlike some men, he seems to be aware of that. Hortense will pull through. She's got more of her mother in her than one would think."

"Is Josephine so strong?"

"When she needs to be."

Mélanie fixed her gaze on the water rushing dark over the stones of the streambed. "I can steal. I can kill. I can do things I never thought I'd be capable of. Things I'm not proud to be capable of. But what Hortense did today— I don't know that I could do that. Put my child into the care of someone else—even someone I trusted—and know that he would grow up without me. Perhaps it's just as well that I'm exceedingly unlikely ever to have a child of my own."

"You're a bit young to be swearing off parenthood."

She returned the flask to him. "Do you? Have children?"

"Not that I know of. We don't exactly live a life that's suited to it. Which doesn't mean I've never thought of it."

"Don't tell me you have a secret longing for a rose-covered cottage and a nursery of fat babies."

A smile pulled at his mouth. "Hardly. But the thought of home has a certain seduction."

"Has it been a long time since you were back?"

"So long I was quite another person."

"That could mean yesterday."

"So it could.“ He took a swallow from the flask. "I used to think what I wanted more than anything else was my freedom."

"You're the most free person I know."

"Ah, but then you don't really know me at all, do you?"

"Used to think?" she said.

"Lately I find that even I am subject to the occasional cliché longings. The land one's ancestors trod. The air one breathed in childhood. The smile of one's first love.“ He reached out and tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear.

Mélanie steeled herself against any reaction. "Was she your first love?"

"Who?"

"Josephine."

"I was young enough that she might have been.“ He returned the flask to his pocket and held out his hand. "Come back to the inn, cara. Hortense will need you. All we can do is take care of what needs to be done, one step at a time."

She accepted his hand and let him pull her to her feet. "That's what Raoul says."

"And O'Roarke has an annoying habit of being right."

London

January, 1820

Do what needs to be done, one step at a time. Don’t get side-tracked by panic even if the situation seems urgent. Especially if the situation seems urgent. Raoul’s words ran through Mélanie’s head as she rang the bell of the Pendarves house in Upper Brook Street. Raoul’s advice often ran through her head when she was worried. And God knew she was worried now, far more than she’d admit, even to Charles. Hortense had failed to appear for their scheduled rendezvous this morning, though Mélanie had waited an extra half hour and circled the square. Which could mean she was in trouble, as Flahaut had feared. Or that, far from being a victim, she had been involved in Raoul's abduction. Or that she was working with Raoul, and he hadn't been abducted at all.

Mélanie had a bone-crunching fear that Raoul was already dead or that he was being killed even as she went through the maddeningly slow motions of trying to get him back. And she had another, deeper, more gnawing fear that Roth’s speculation was right. That Raoul had orchestrated his own disappearance because he’d been working against them all along. His touching farewell to Colin could simply mean he was turning against Colin’s parents.

Memories clustered in her mind. Wind-twisted trees in the camp where the bandits had held her. Sinking into a darkness that offered escape from a pain she could no longer bear. A familiar voice, unusually sharp. Gunshots. His hands gentle on her bruised skin, untying her, lifting her. His arms encircling her as they rode over rocky ground. His lips against her hair. His voice, when they had reached safety telling her to rest, trying to talk to her about what had happened. And her own. For God’s sake don’t talk. Just take me to bed. I don’t want to think.

Close on those memories came another, so distinct she had could feel the cold, clean bite of the Spanish mountain air. Slipping out of bed and touching her fingers to his sleeping face before she went off on a mission. She’d never gone in for formal farewells, because that would risk giving way to sentiment. And because it would be admitting that they might never see each other again, and they had never admitted that. There were a lot of things they’d never admitted.

The glossy blue-painted door of the Pendarves house was opened by a footman in faultless gray livery. His face indicated that, while he was far too well-trained to say so, it was early for callers. Mélanie gave him her card. She’d scrawled “urgent” on the back.A few moments later, she was shown into a first-floor sitting room hung with forget-me-knot paper where Lady Pendarves sat with her children, a girl of ten or so and a boy of about five. Mélanie apologized for not bringing her own children and admired the fort the young Pendarveses were building out of blocks.

Lady Pendarves rang for the nurse and a tea tray.

“Thank you for indulging the children,” she said, when the nurse had taken them off. “We’ve just come back from church, and I usually spend the morning with them.“ She lifted a hyacinth-splashed Spode teapot and began to pour. “Did you enjoy the opera?”

“Very much. I only wish I could have seen more of it.”

“So lovely to think that Angelina and Don Ramiro have a happy future ahead of them. I always worry about Rosina and the Count after Barber of Seville, because one knows Le nozze di Figaro lies ahead. And Mozart—well, there’s always something unsettling about him, no matter how glorious his music, isn’t there? I find Mr. Rossini much more comforting. Milk or lemon?”