Free Beneath a Silent Moon by Tracy Grant

the middle of the war, with the British and the French and God knows how many Spanish factions at each other's throats. A sniper killed one of our friends and shot at us in the middle of the city in peacetime."
    And not just any city. The city that was now home. The city he'd brought his wife and children to, thinking it was safe. God help him, last night he'd actually relished the call of adventure. Guilt welled up on his tongue, sour as spoiled milk. "And the sniper had a second gunman in place in case they lost their quarry," he said. "Which argues money. And power."
    "And desperation. Whatever they were trying to conceal was worth considerable risk. To themselves as well as us."
    He stared at the yellow glow of the streetlamps through the carriage window. "If I'd known—"
    "We couldn't have done anything differently, Charles. Francisco chose the meeting place. Unless we've both lost any instinct for avoiding pursuit, we weren't followed. Someone must have followed him. Or got wind of it some other way."
    "Save your cosseting for the children, Mel." Her sweet reasonableness grated on the guilty, dark core inside him, rubbing raw places he had never let her glimpse. "I'm old enough to live with my mistakes."
    She drew a breath that had a harsh rasp to it. "If there's blame to go round, I'm just as much to blame as you."
    "No sense in wallowing." He locked his hands together. "They didn't just want Francisco. They wanted whatever he might have told us. Whatever's in those papers."
    Mélanie turned her head to look at him. "Do the words Elsinore League mean anything to you?"
    "Other than echoes of a corrupt court in Renaissance Denmark? No."
    Randall turned the carriage into the forecourt of the Albany. Charles had had bachelor chambers in the Palladian building himself in a brief interval between Oxford and Lisbon. The sight of the brown-brick walls slapped him in the face with the memory of one of his greatest failures. He swallowed the bitterness and handed Mélanie from the carriage.
    Simon Tanner opened the door of his and David's flat, evening coat rumpled, neckcloth gone, shirt open at the neck. "Oh, Lord," he said, steadying his grip on the lamp he carried. "I knew things had been quiet for too long. What is it this time, politics or family?"
    "Politics, as best we can tell." Mélanie stepped into the shadowy entrance hall and smiled at David, who stood behind Simon, as meticulously dressed as if he was at the start of the evening rather than the end of it.
    "Sorry for the late hour," Charles said, "but we have to be at Covent Garden at seven and it isn't safe for us to go home first."
    David's gaze swept over them as they moved into the light of the entryway. "My God, what have you done to yourselves?"
    "Grown careless in our old age," Charles said.
    "But—"
    Mélanie glanced down at her gown. "Most of the blood isn't ours."
    David regarded Charles with the misgivings of one who'd known him since boyhood. "You're hurt."
    "No," said Charles.
    "Yes," said Mélanie, "but it's not serious. I need lint and alcohol, a good light, and someone to make Charles hold still."
    David went down the corridor in search of medical supplies while Simon led the way to the book-strewn sitting room. He went straight to the drinks table and poured two whiskies. "We just got back ourselves," he said. "I dragged David to the Tavistock to make sure the actors weren't mangling my dialogue too atrociously and then we had a late supper at the Piazza." He pressed the whiskies into Charles's and Mélanie's hands. "Wait till David returns for the story. No sense in telling it twice."
    Charles curved his fingers round the glass, relieved to find that his hands had stopped shaking. Mélanie took a long swallow and drew a breath. She was several shades paler than usual. In the light from the tapers on the Pembroke table, he saw splashes of blood on the lace at the neck of her gown. He could feel the weight of Francisco's body in his arms, smell the