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Authors: Imperial Scandal

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35
Friday, 16 June
 
S
uzanne changed into her nightdress but knew sleep would elude her. Outside her window booted feet thudded, iron wheels groaned, horses whinnied, and their hoofs beat a quick tattoo against the cobblestones. Drums and bugles and fifes sounded in the distance. Doors banged open and shut, accompanied by calls of farewell.
She lit the tapers on her escritoire and wrote out everything she had learned at the ball, in code, for Raoul, in case there was information he wasn’t aware of. The need to be meticulous, to remember numbers and names and geographic positions, steadied her. Until she found herself staring down at the black ink marks. Acts of betrayal against Malcolm and Harry Davenport and Fitzroy Somerset and countless others turned to neat strokes of the pen.
She saw Frederick Radley in the Duchess of Richmond’s ballroom, looking at her with the same arrogance as when she’d seduced him on a mission nearly three years ago.
Radley had nearly trapped her in Vienna. She’d been forced to tell Malcolm a version of the truth of her relationship with him. And Malcolm had believed her without question. It hadn’t made the least difference to him that his wife had had a lover before she married him.
Droplets of ink spattered from her pen onto the paper. Her fingers were shaking. Her whole body seemed to be shaking. She dropped the pen and hugged her arms round herself. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It was no different now from how it had ever been. She tried to conjure memories of Lord Castlereagh and Prince Metternich in Vienna, their cool, bloodless voices inexorably arguing the need to turn the clock back on every reform made in the past twenty-five years.
One could form friendships with the other side. One could fall in love with someone on the other side. It didn’t change the sides.
She reached for the pen again, just as she heard a door banging below. She grabbed her dressing gown and ran onto the landing, struggling into the folds of satin and lace.
Addison stood in the hall below, bareheaded and mud spattered. Blanca was already running down the stairs.
“I’m sorry, madam,” he said as Suzanne followed Blanca down the stairs. “I’m scarcely fit for the house.”
“Nonsense, but you must be exhausted and starving. Come into the kitchen, and we’ll get you something to eat. You’ve just missed Malcolm. He left from the ball. You must have passed him on the road.”
“Very likely. It was difficult enough to keep to the road in the chaos, let alone see the faces of passersby.”
“There’s blood on your coat,” Blanca said, seizing his arm. It had long been plain to Suzanne that her maid had feelings for Malcolm’s valet that went beyond friendship, but she’d never been able to determine how far matters had progressed between them.
Addison gave the ghost of a smile. “It isn’t mine.”
While Blanca heated soup, Addison sat at the deal table in the kitchen with Suzanne, sipped from a glass of whisky she’d given him, and recounted what he’d learned. “I was with one of the Belgian picquets at Quatre Bras at about five when French lancers attacked them. Light cavalry soon joined in. But the Belgians stood firm and fought them off. They deserve better than the way people have been talking about them.”
Blanca snorted. “That’s the British. You’d think no one else had ever learned how to hold a musket.” Blanca had seen a good deal of the British army in Spain and the respect—or lack of it—with which they viewed her Spanish compatriots.
Addison cast a quick smile of acknowledgment at her, then turned back to Suzanne. “The French fell back to Frasnes. But they’ll attack again in the morning. And from what I saw, the Belgians will be badly outnumbered if our reinforcements don’t get to them in time. A Belgian private told me even with reinforcements they only have about seven thousand men and eight guns and the French must have twenty thousand.”
The words reverberated in Suzanne’s head, wonderful and terrible. “Wellington’s ordered the army to march,” she said. “They’ll be there soon.”
Addison took a sip of whisky, holding the glass in both hands. “I only hope it’s soon enough.”
She stayed in the kitchen a quarter hour longer, then went back upstairs because Blanca and Addison deserved their privacy. And because she had work to do. Because really there was no choice in the matter. She hadn’t come this far to turn her back on her cause and her comrades now.
The village of Quatre Bras stood at a crossroads. One road led north from Charleroi, which was now in French hands, to Brussels. The other was the link between Wellington’s troops in the west and Marshal Blücher’s Prussians in the east. Take the crossroads and one could separate the British and the Prussians. Which would give the French a chance at victory.
She dipped her pen back in the inkpot, her hand now steady. With decision came a certain calm, even if something felt numb and dead inside her. She turned Addison’s information into neat lines of code, sealed the paper with red wax pressed with a plain button, and then put a pelisse of indigo sarcenet on over her nightdress and laced on a pair of half boots. The house was quiet. She wondered if Blanca had gone to share Addison’s bed. She hoped she had. She slipped out through the French windows to the garden and found her way by memory through the gate to the mews. Shouts, booted feet marching, the clip-clop of horse hoofs, the scrape of wheels, the call of bugles, the shrill music of fifes, the beating of drums still filled the air. The red-orange glow of torches pierced the pre-dawn darkness. She cut across a larger street and passed a group of infantrymen, but they merely nodded at her, assuming she was going to or from saying farewell to a lover or husband.
Philippe Valery opened the door of his lodgings off the Rue de Laeken and stared at her with wide blue eyes. “You shouldn’t have come, madame. It’s too dangerous.”
“There’s no time for the usual precautions. And just about everyone in Brussels has other concerns tonight.” She slipped into his room and pulled the sealed paper from her sleeve. “Can you get this to Raoul? It’s important.”
Philippe gave a quick nod. Despite the hour, he was fully dressed. In the greasy light of the single tallow candle Suzanne noted a pack on the floor by the door. “I’m off in any case,” he said, his thin face taut with excitement. “I’m going to join the army.”
Suzanne put out her hand. “Philippe, no. Your work is here.”
“Not once the fighting actually starts. Things will be decided before our information can be of use. I don’t want to be on the sidelines.” He fumbled in his pocket. “Can you take this in case anything happens to me? For Anne-Marie.”
Suzanne hugged him. She’d known his father in the Peninsula. He’d been one of her ablest contacts until he died at the battle of Fuentes de Oñoro. She’d met Philippe’s mother in Paris a year ago when the Allies invaded and Napoleon was sent to Elba. Madame Valery passed messages for the Bonapartists herself and was proud of her son. It was her face Suzanne saw as she embraced Philippe. He was seventeen. Only fifteen years older than Colin.
“We shall have a great victory, madame,” Philippe said. “You’ll see.”
Had her own eyes ever had that look of shining certainty? Suzanne hugged him again and smoothed his fair hair as though he were her son. If the French marched into Brussels in triumph, she wouldn’t be there to see it. She’d be fleeing to her husband’s country. Hopefully with her husband.
Malcolm tightened his arm round the throat of the man he had just taken prisoner in the Forest of Soignies. “Who sent you?”
His captive went silent and still. Precisely what Malcolm would have done in the same situation.
“Why were you following me?”
“You?” English, a north London accent. “I wasn’t following you.”
Progress. Though surprising. “What the hell are you doing here if you weren’t following me?”
Silence. The wood was shadowy and still about them, though the tramp of feet sounded in the distance.
“Look.” Malcolm pressed his pistol closer to the man’s side. “We’re in the midst of a war now. Gentlemen’s niceties tend to go by the wayside.” An argument that might work if the man didn’t have a good sense of Malcolm’s character.
Silence again.
“Did the Silver Hawk send you?” Malcolm asked.
“The who?” the man asked, voice sharp with surprise.
“The—”
Booted feet crunched through underbrush. An improbable sound split the air. Someone whistling Papageno’s bird catcher’s aria. Malcolm went still, but the whistling broke off abruptly. “Who goes there?” a voice with a distinct Scots accent demanded.
Malcolm drew back into the shadows, maintaining his hold on his quarry.
The boots thudded closer. “See here—Good Lord, Rannoch?”
“MacDermid,” Malcolm said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Major Hamish MacDermid peered at Malcolm in the pre-dawn light. “What the devil are you up to?”
“Interrogating a suspect.”
MacDermid shifted his position, staring at the man in Malcolm’s grip. “Good God. It’s Watkins.”
“You know this man?”
“Should think so. He’s Chase’s batman.”
“This man is Anthony Chase’s batman?”
“Not Tony’s. George’s.”
The man in Malcolm’s grip drew a breath. “Mr. Rannoch. Perhaps it would be best if we spoke.”
“Excellent idea. That’s been my suggestion all along.” Malcolm released his grip on Watkins’s throat and spun him round, keeping the pistol leveled at his chest. “Major George Chase sent you to follow me?”
“Not you, sir.” Watkins drew a breath as though unsure what to say. His gaze slid sideways to MacDermid, then back to Malcolm. He released his breath. “Major Chase had me looking for Captain Tony.”
 
Raoul O’Roarke swung down from his horse at French Headquarters at Charleroi. The mare’s sides heaved and her coat was damp with sweat from the hard ride. Raoul patted her neck, turned the reins over to a sentry, and made his way to Napoleon’s tent (even now it grated on Raoul’s Republican convictions to think of him as the emperor).
Raoul could feel the crackle of Suzanne’s message inside the cuff of his shirt. She’d done well. Amazingly well, though he knew just how much it had cost her. He’d been right to put his faith in her. He pictured the girl he’d first met in the brothel in Léon, the almost feral wariness in the way she held herself, the fierce line of her jaw, the burning eyes, the quick, biting wit. She’d changed a great deal. But the core of that girl remained.
General Flahaut, aide-de-camp to Napoleon, ducked out of the tent, tugging his coat on over a stained shirt and crumpled cravat. His well-cut features were drawn with exhaustion and blue shadows showed beneath his eyes.
“I have a message for him,” Raoul said.
“He’s asleep,” Flahaut said. “As I was.”
“I have intelligence from Quatre Bras. The Allies only have a battery of eight guns and no more than seven thousand men. If you move now, you can take the crossroads easily.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“It’s the middle of a war.”
“Look, O’Roarke. We’ve been marching and fighting since two in the morning yesterday. Fifteen hours without respite or refreshment and more than that for the forward troops. Our men are dropping from exhaustion. Not to mention that they’re spread from Marchienne to Fleurus.”
“I was at a ball in Brussels last night with Wellington. He ordered his troops to march. He’ll have reinforcements at Quatre Bras by afternoon. You have a very small window in which to gain a crucial advantage. Damn it, man, this could decide the campaign.”
Flahaut shook his head. “It will be up to Ney, God help him. He’s been given command of the left wing. He’s barely had time to settle in. He doesn’t yet know the strength of his regiments. Or the names of their generals, let alone their colonels. Or how many men actually kept up with the march and got here. He and the emperor were closeted until two.”
Raoul took a step forward, fueled by the frustration of past missed opportunities. “For God’s sake—”

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