Beneath a Silent Moon

Chapter One

Glenister House,
Grosvenor Square
Later the same evening

I wish he'd never come back to England, damn him."

The words, delivered in the light voice of a nineteen-year-old young lady of quality but with the intensity of a hardened soldier, hung incongruously in the rose-scented air. Evelyn Mortimer turned her gaze from the swirl of dancers on the black-and-white marble of her uncle's ballroom floor below to study the speaker. She'd had a feeling when she awoke this morning that this bid fair to be the longest day of her life. At the moment, it was looking as though it might be rather worse.

"It's no good trying to create a stir with your shocking language, Gelly," Evie said. "I'm the only one within earshot. You wish who'd never come back to England?"

"Who do you think?" Gisèle Fraser's kid-gloved fingers tightened round the etched crystal of her champagne glass. "My odious brother."

Evie gripped the gilded wrought-iron balustrade in a vain attempt to still the unease roiling through her. The candlelight shimmered over the scene below, glinting indiscriminately off real diamonds and paste copies, flickering over painted silk fans and starched cravats, playing off polished silver trays and crystal glasses, tapestry-hung walls and classical friezes. Yet she could feel the tension rippling beneath this spun-sugar world. A tension that stood to shatter the peace of the evening.

She spotted the tall, lean figure of Gisèle's brother on the far side of the dance floor, talking with two other black-coated gentlemen. At first glance, Charles Fraser appeared little different from any other man at the ball. His coat was cut less extravagantly than some, though he wore it better than most, and his shirt points were not as ridiculously high as the style some of the young gallants affected. But something else marked him out from the throng, a restless intensity in the set of his shoulders and the angle of his head. Like an actor who is giving a creditable performance of Goldsmith but would much rather sink his teeth into Hamlet.

Alarm prickled the back of Evie's neck. Of all the complications of the evening, it was Charles Fraser's presence that chilled her to the bone. "Odious isn't exactly the word I'd use to describe your brother," she said.

Gisèle tossed back the remaining quarter of her glass of champagne. "He doesn't belong here."

"At Glenister House?" Evie continued to watch Charles. He was leaning an arm against one of the pillars with casual ease, yet she had the sense that even here he was ready to spin round and disarm an attacker. "I hate to argue, but I went over the invitation list myself, and I can assure you he was invited."

"In Britain," Gisèle said. "I'm sure Wellington and Castlereagh still need him in Paris, stealing documents and unmasking traitors and shooting people and that sort of thing."

"Is that what diplomats do?" Was it too much to hope that Charles might decide to leave the ball early? Yes, it probably was. "And here I thought they filled their days with dull things like signing treaties and shuffling papers."

"Charles wasn't a normal diplomat. Only he won't talk about what he really did during the war and I'm not supposed to ask questions. Not that I want to talk to him. After nine years, we really don't have anything to say to each other. Which is why I wish to heaven he'd stayed on the Continent, instead of coming home and dragging that wife of his along from Spain -- "

"Portugal." Evie mentally cursed herself for allowing the conversation to take this turn. Discussing Charles Fraser's marriage was like stumbling into an ever more treacherous mire. "He was at the embassy in Lisbon when he married her."

"But she's Spanish. And French. She has those exotic looks that gentlemen find annoyingly attractive." Gisèle twisted one of the pink silk roses on the left shoulder of her gown. "Everyone says she married him for his money."

"It's always difficult to know why one person marries another," Evie said. The words seemed to hang in the air, cutting like a knife through the pastel fabric of the evening.

"I can't imagine why Charles married her," Gisèle said. "She's very pretty, but he treats her more like a junior attaché than the woman he loves. I've scarcely seen them within ten feet of each other all evening. Of course, the whole concept of Charles being in love seems self-contradictory."

Evie glanced down at the ballroom again. Even amid a fair share of London's Upper Ten Thousand, Mrs. Charles Fraser stood out like a poppy in a posy of hothouse roses. It wasn't her looks, though her dark hair and pale skin were undeniably dramatic. Or her gown, though she had plainly brought the narrow, clean-lined creation of spider gauze and silver satin with her from Paris. It was the way she held herself, with a graceful ease that seemed out of place in an English ballroom.

It wasn't easy to be an outsider in this world, as Evie knew to her own cost. For an instant her mind was flooded with the memory of her uncle's crested black traveling carriage, arriving late one night to take her away from the crowded, dingy house that was the only home and family she'd ever known.

She swallowed, so hard that she felt as if the life was being choked out of her. Absurd. It wasn't the past that mattered now, it was the present. She needed her wits about her to get through tonight with all the key players still in one piece ...