Chapter One
"All the world may be a stage, but sometimes the diaIogue's too bloody ridiculous for any self-respecting playwright." Charles Fraser set down his candle and shrugged out of his evening coat, sparing a silent curse for the close-fitting fashions of the day. "What is it about diplomatic receptions that always brings on the most god-awful lapses in tact?"
"Don't tell me you expect diplomats to be diplomatic, darling." Mé lanie unwound the voluminous cashmere folds of her shawl from her shoulders and began to peel off her gloves. "That would be much too logical."
Charles tossed his coat over a tapestry chair back, turned up the crystal Agrand lamp that had been left lit in readiness for them, and moved to the fireplace. They never had his valet and Mé lanie's maid wait up, but a fire was laid in the grate. He picked up the poker and stirred the coals.
"What particularly appalling dialogue caught your attention tonight?" Mé lanie asked.
Charles turned from the fire to look at his wife. She was sitting at her dressing table, her feet drawn up onto the striped damask chair so she could remove her evening slippers. Her glossy dark ringlets fell about her face, exposing the curve of her neck. The pearl-embroidered skirt of her gown was tucked up as she unwound the ivory satin ribbons that crisscrossed her silk-stockinged ankles. Strange, when he knew every inch of her, that his breath still caught at the sight. "Lady Bury told Ned Ellison that his wife looked charming dancing with Peter Grantham and hadn't they been dancing to the same waltz at the Cowpers' only two nights ago?"
Mé lanie looked up, one slipper dangling by the ribbons from her fingers."Oh, dear. That would seem glaringly obvious on any stage. Though if Ellison doesn't know his wife's sleeping with Peter Grantham, he's the last person in London not to be in on the secret."
Charles moved to the satinwood table that held his greatgrandmother's Irish crystal decanter and glasses. "Poor bastard. One of those mad fools besotted with his own wife." He shot her a glance. "Not that I'd know anything about that."
She returned the glance, a glint in her eyes. "Of course not."
He took the stopper from the decanter. Ellison's gaze, as he watched his wife circle the floor with her lover, had stirred images of a past Charles would just as soon forget. He paused, the heavy cut-glass stopper in his hand, an uncomfortable weight in his memory.
Mé lanie flexed her foot. "I rather think his adoration may be the problem. Too much can be smothering. Literally. Think of Othello."
Charles jerked himself out of the past. "Ellison doesn't strike me as the violent sort." He poured an inch of whisky into two glasses.
"He's a quiet brooder." She dropped her slippers to the floor and got to her feet. "They're the ones who snap."
Seven years of marriage and her perceptiveness about people could still surprise him. He set down the decanter and replaced the stopper. "Am I the sort who'd snap?"
She turned from lighting the tapers on her dressing table, laughter in her eyes. "Controlled, dispassionate Charles Fraser? Oh, no, darling. Anyone who's been to bed with you knows you aren't nearly as cold as you let on."
He walked over to her, carrying the glasses of whisky. "So I'm the perfect sort of husband to betray?"
"Not quite." Her gaze was appraising, but her lips trembledwith humor. "You're much too intelligent, dearest. You'd be damnably difficult to deceive."
He put one of the glasses into her hand. "Sounds as though you've considered it."
She leaned against the dressing table and took a meditative sip of whisky. "Well, I might." Her eyes, a color between blue agate and the green of Iona marble, gleamed in her pale face. "Except that it would be quite impossible to find anyone who's your equal, my love."
He regarded her, aware of a smile playing about his mouth. "Good answer."
"Yes, I rather thought it was."
He lifted one hand and ran his fingers down the familiar line of her throat. The puffed gossamer that was an excuse for a sleeve slipped from her shoulder. His fingers molded to her skin. The scent of her perfume filled his senses, roses and vanilla and some other fragrance that still remained elusive after all these years.
A lump of coal fell from the grate and hissed against the fender. He swore, shrugged his shoulders, and went to pick up the poker.
"You warned me about it," Mé lanie said from the dressing table. "The night you proposed."
He pushed the coal into the grate. "Warned you about what? "
"That -- in your words -- you weren't a demonstrative man. That you'd thought you'd never marry, your parents had set a miserable example, and you weren't sure how good you'd be at it."
He looked at her over his shoulder. "I didn't really say that."
"You did." She curled up, catlike, on her dressing table chair. "You pointed out all the potential pitfalls with scrupulous care. It might have been a white paper you'd drawn up for the ambassador on the advantages and disadvantages of a treaty. You didn't even try to kissme."
"I should think not. That might have risked biasing your judgment. One way or the other." He returned the poker to its stand. "Of course, if I had, perhaps you'd have given me an answer straightaway, instead of going off to think about it for the most uncomfortable three days I have ever spent."
"Charles, given what you've been through in your life, that has to be hyperbole."
He kept his gaze on her face. "Not necessarily."
She unfastened her pearl earrings without breaking eye contact. "Terrified I'd accept?"
"Mel, the most terrifying thing I can imagine is life without you."
Mé lanie looked at him a moment longer, her eyes dark. Then she gave one of her wonderful smiles. The smile she'd given him after their first, awkward kiss in a drafty embassy corridor, with a military band blaring in the street outside. The smile he'd opened his eyes upon when he'd recovered consciousness after a gunshot wound to find her sitting beside his camp bed, three months into their strangely begun marriage.
Charles returned the smile, then looked away, because sometimes, even now, what they had together was so miraculous it scared him. He stared into the leaping flames in the grate. Thinking about their betrothal made him think about their son and the scene that had been enacted earlier tonight. "Were we too hard on Colin, do you think? I hate to ring a peal over him to no purpose."
"Is that what your father would have done?" Mé lanie said.
His fingers curled round the glass. The Fraser crest, etched into the crystal, bit into his skin. "Hardly. Father wouldn't have come to the nursery at all, unless Edgar or I were spilling our lifeblood onto the carpet. And even thenhe'd have taken care the blood didn't seep onto his boots. More likely he'd have summoned me to his study when the dust had settled and told me if I must murder my brother could I have the decency to do it outside on the lawn."
"And you'd have much preferred it if he'd beaten you?"
He swirled the whisky in his glass. "At least that would have implied he had a passing interest in whether we lived or died."
An emotion he couldn't have defined flickered like a shadow across Mé lanie's face. She unclasped the pendant he'd commissioned from a Lisbon jeweler for their first anniversary. The candlelight gleamed against the rose gold of the Celtic knotwork and the green gold of the Spanish poppy at the center. "It's never easy to be betrayed, least of all by those one should be able to trust the most."
"Even at my most maudlin, I can hardly claim either of my parents betrayed me. Unless you consider lack of affection a betrayal."
"The worst betrayal of all. Your father was certainly guilty of it."
Charles took a sip of whisky, savoring the smoky bite of the liquor. He was seized
On a cloud-shrouded night in November 1816, six-year-old Colin Fraser vanishes from the safe cocoon of his family's Berkeley Square home. For his father Charles, an idealistic MP, former intelligence agent, and grandson of a duke, and mother Mélanie, a beautiful war refugee and society's most charming hostess, it is a tragedy that will rip their extraordinary marriage asunder and force them to question everything they believe in. Colin's captors are demanding a bizarre ransom: an exquisite ring surrounded by the promise of power. The search for it will pull the Frasers into a maze of intrigue that winds through the lowest and highest levels of London secrets -- revealing layer upon layer of deception and betrayal, and a shocking truth that binds Charles and Mélanie inextricably together ... even as it threatens to destroy them both.
In a world of artifice and infidelity, Charles and Melanies marriage seems to be a model of trust and constancy. But when their son is kidnapped, the search to find him rips their perfect jewel-box life asunder and lays open the hard-to-face truths which lurk at the heart of their marriage.
Tracy Grant studied British history at Stanford University and received the Firestone Award for Excellence in Research for her honors thesis. She lives in northern California, where she is on the board of the Merola Opera Program, a training program for professional opera singers, coaches, and stage directors, and is managing director of h e l p: human elemental laboratory of performance. Daughter of the Game,the further adventures of Charles and MÉlanie Fraser, is also available from Morrow/Avon.