Teresa Grant (7 page)

Authors: Imperial Scandal

BOOK: Teresa Grant

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C
ordelia Davenport knocked at a shiny blue-painted door in Rue Royale. From her sister’s letters, she knew that this house with the neat brass knocker was where Julia and Johnny had been staying in Brussels.

If she had arrived in Brussels two hours sooner, if she hadn’t stopped on the journey from Ostend so Livia could have milk and cakes in the coffee room of Les Trois Reines, if instead of dressing for the ball and talking to Caro she’d gone straight to Julia’s the moment she arrived in Brussels—If somehow she’d managed to speak with her sister before the ball.

Cordelia drew a breath that shuddered against her corset laces. The questions would be with her until the day she died.

A footman whose crumpled neckcloth and unfocused gaze suggested he had been dozing in the hall pulled open the door.

“I’m here to see Captain Ashton,” Cordelia said.

The footman blinked at her with sleep-flushed eyes. “Madame, it’s—”

“I’m his sister-in-law.” Cordelia pushed past him into the entrance hall. Marble tiled with pale blue walls and crisp white moldings. Small but exquisitely proportioned. Cards of invitation spilled from a silver filigree box on a pier table. A trace of familiar jasmine and iris scent lingered in the air. Trust Julia to find an elegant abode. She always—She
had
always—Damnation.

“Where’s Captain Ashton?” Cordelia demanded before tears could betray her.

“The study. But, madame—”

It was a good guess that the double doors beneath the ornate doorcase to the left led to a library. She pulled open the dark paneled door beyond them. Candlelight and the smell of brandy greeted her. Johnny sat slumped in a leather wingback chair, a glass in his hand, a single taper burning on the table beside him. He looked up at the opening of the door, but it seemed a moment or two before he made sense of her presence.

“Cordelia.” Her name was almost a question.

Cordelia pushed the door to and advanced into the room. “Harry told me.”

A spasm crossed his face. “Should have told you myself. But I couldn’t face—”

“You needed to get out of there before you collapsed. It’s just as well. I needed to hear what Harry had discovered. And he took me to see Julia.”

“You
saw
her?” Johnny stared at her for a moment, then shuddered. “Dear God, I should have—I didn’t even—” A flame of desperate hope lit his eyes. “Was it her? Are you sure?”

Cordelia sank down on a footstool beside her brother-in-law’s chair. “I’m afraid there’s no doubt, Johnny.” She laid her hand over his own.

“No. Of course not.” He took a quick swallow of brandy, then stared into the glass as though he were looking into the gates of hell. “Did you know?”

“That Julia was dead? Of course not, how—”

“That she was the Prince of Orange’s mistress.” Johnny’s lips twisted with uncharacteristic bitterness as he framed the words. And with a sort of disbelief, as though even now a part of his brain refused to make sense of it.

“The Prince of Orange?” Cordelia drew a sharp breath. So that was what Harry hadn’t wanted to tell her. Dear God, what had her sister been up to? “Johnny, I haven’t seen Julia since you left England.”

“She writes—wrote—to you every week. More sometimes. She always confided in you. Especially—”

“You think one adulteress confides in another?”

Johnny flinched.

“I’m sorry,” Cordelia said. “That was uncalled for. You were never quick to judge me.”

His fingers tightened round the glass. “Were there ... others?”

For an incongruous moment she saw Harry, not tonight, but four years ago, before his face had acquired the bitter lines it now bore and his eyes had grown bleak and closed. His gaze had been uncharacteristically open that night and so vulnerable, and when she answered his questions she’d seen her words smash home in his eyes.

“Johnny, Julia was—”

“I thought she loved me. I thought we were happy.”

Cordelia pressed her fingers over the black net and claret satin of her gown. The fabric gleamed bloodred between the white of her gloves. “Johnny, just because a woman strays it doesn’t necessarily mean she doesn’t love her husband. Or even that she isn’t happy.”

“But—”

“After all, that’s what gentlemen always say about their
chère-amies,
isn’t it?”

He opened his mouth to protest, then frowned. “So there
were
others?”

She sorted through a weight of suspicions and half-truths balanced against the fragility in her brother-in-law’s eyes. “I’m not sure. I do know she was very happy when she married you.”

“I thought she was. But I thought I was sure of a lot of things about her.” Johnny took another swallow of brandy. “God. Do you think Robbie—”

Cordelia drew a sharp breath at the thought of her nephew. “He looks just like you, Johnny.”

“I can never see it properly.”

“One can’t often with one’s own children.” She saw Livia for a moment when she had gone in to kiss her good night before the ball, curled up peacefully in her bed at Caro’s. And then she saw Robbie with his bright eyes and quick smile. An eager little boy who would now grow up without a mother. “How is he?”

“What—” Johnny ran a hand over his hair. “He’s fine. Asleep. I looked in on him when I got home. Needed to be sure he was all right somehow. But I didn’t—Dear Christ, how do you tell a two-year-old his mother’s dead?”

Cordelia touched his hand again. “I can come back in the morning if you like. But he needs to hear it from you.”

Johnny gave a quick nod, his gaze fixed on his brandy glass. “If I hadn’t brought them here. If I’d made them go back to England—”

“I’ve been thinking the same thoughts myself.” She crossed her arms, pressing her fingers against her rib cage. “They get one nowhere.”

He hunched his shoulders as though fighting off a wave of—Pain? Guilt? “I can’t even remember the last moment I saw her. Across the supper room, I think.” The bitterness in his voice had given way to the ache of loss. “Wellington and Rannoch said someone arranged for her to arrive alone at the château tonight. Who—”

“Johnny, this is important.” Cordelia took the brandy glass from his hand and set it on the table beside the taper. “Had Julia done or said anything out of the ordinary in recent days?”

He cast a glance at the glass, then frowned at her. “No. I told you, I had no idea—”

“Not about her affair with the Prince of Orange. Did she seem distressed?”

“She didn’t—” Johnny frowned in a seemingly genuine effort of memory. “We’ve been flitting from one event to another. And with me being called to my regiment so much, there were whole days when we saw each other only in the carriage on the way to some damn dinner or ball. Oh God, do you think—”

“It takes more than that to make someone stray.” Although God knows boredom could play far more of a role in infidelity than she’d like to admit.

“She seemed—More restless perhaps. Her eyes had that glitter they get sometimes, and I don’t think she was sleeping well. She’d started taking laudanum drops. And when I suggested two days ago that in view of the situation she might take Robbie back to England, she nearly bit my head off. It was the worst row we’ve had since—”

“Since you found out about her gambling debts?”

Johnny turned his head away. “That was years ago. When we were first married and foolish. I—”

“You had every right to be angry. Johnny, was Julia gambling again?”

“Of course not.” He swung his gaze back to her. “What makes you ask that?”

“Perhaps our father’s example. Once a gamester, always a gamester.”

“No. Not Julia. She promised me—” He gave a harsh laugh. “That’s rich, isn’t it? But I’d swear she hasn’t played more than silver loo since all that nonsense.” He picked up the brandy glass and turned it in his hand, as though searching for answers in the cut glass.

Cordelia studied him. She’d known Johnny since they were all in the nursery, playing in Hyde Park under the supervision of their nursery maids, riding their first ponies, sharing iced cakes and cambric tea at birthday parties. Johnny had always been kind and dependable, quick to smooth over a fight, to rescue a doll tossed into the duck pond, to play patiently with the younger children. He was one of the most open people she’d ever encountered. Looking into his ravaged gaze now, she knew without a doubt that his grief was genuine.

But she had a niggling certainty, sharp as a knife stab, that there was something he wasn’t telling her.

Malcolm made his way across the ballroom, stopping to speak to Fitzroy Somerset (who ran a shrewd gaze over his not-quite-perfectly fitting coat) and to several others who didn’t seem to have the least idea he’d been missing from the party. He found his wife at last by the French windows, talking to a tall, thin man with a shock of dark hair, a fine-boned face, and intense gray eyes.

“O’Roarke.” Malcolm held out his hand. “I was wondering where you’d got to.”

“I was wondering the same, Rannoch.” Raoul O’Roarke shook Malcolm’s hand.

“You know my habit of disappearing into the library at entertainments. My wife often bemoans it. I spent a bit longer with David Hume than I intended.”

“Indeed.” O’Roarke’s gaze told Malcolm he saw a good deal more. Raoul O’Roarke was no stranger to intrigue. Half-Spanish, half-Irish, he was a friend of Malcolm’s parents and had been involved in the United Irish Uprising in 1798. In more recent years he had worked with the
guerrilleros
who had allied with the British in driving the French out of Spain during the war in the Peninsula. “Rumors were circulating through the ballroom like wildfire for a bit,” O’Roarke added, “but they seem to have died down. Your wife has formidable diplomatic skills.”

“Vienna taught me a whole different set of skills from the Peninsula,” Suzanne said, curling her hand round Malcolm’s arm.

“Quite so.” O’Roarke smiled. “I must be off. I still have to pay my respects to the Duchess of Richmond.”

Malcolm squeezed Suzanne’s hand as O’Roarke strolled across the ballroom. “Sorry for deserting you for a bit.”

Suzanne’s gaze moved over his borrowed clothes. “That coat doesn’t fit quite as well as the one you arrived in.”

“I know, I think Fitzroy noticed and probably O’Roarke did as well. But hopefully most people will just think they missed the bad tailoring the first look round. It’s not as though I’m known for my sartorial splendor.”

“Tell that to Addison.”

Malcolm grinned. His valet, Addison, was a good agent in his own right but also meticulous about the fit of coats and the proper amount of starch in a cravat and champagne in boot polish. “Thank God Addison isn’t here. I’d never live this down.”

Suzanne tilted her head back to look up at him. “How bad is it?”

He let his gaze roam over the ballroom. Wellington was standing beside his latest flirt, Lady Frances Webster, surrounded by a knot of people, laughing and apparently entertaining them with an anecdote. Stuart was circling the room, champagne glass in hand, the picture of a relaxed host. “Not good. And I’m going to need your help.”

She smiled with something like relief. “I’m glad I at least don’t have to argue with you about that.”

“After Vienna? I wouldn’t dream of it.”

He could see the questions chasing themselves behind his wife’s alert gaze, but she knew better than to voice them in public. In the event, it was another hour before he was able to answer her questions. They had to wait until the guests began to drift from the ball. Social life in Brussels had been frenetic all spring. Guests seemed to linger longer and longer at social engagements, as though determined to extract every last moment of pleasure as the prospect of war loomed ever nearer.

Harry Davenport strolled up beside Malcolm and Suzanne as the earliest guests were leaving. “Considering I wasn’t properly invited, it seems only tactful to make myself scarce. I’ll see you at Headquarters in the morning.”

“You have somewhere to stay?” Malcolm asked him.

“Wouldn’t be much of an agent if I couldn’t scrounge up lodgings at a moment’s notice.” Davenport inclined his head to Suzanne. “Mrs. Rannoch.”

Wellington stayed until almost the last of the guests had left, talking, laughing, dancing one or two waltzes, giving no appearance of a man about to face the most important military engagement of his career. He stopped on his way out and touched Malcolm on the arm.

“Come round to Headquarters in the morning, Rannoch.”

“Of course, sir.”

Wellington nodded and smiled at Suzanne. “My thanks for your efforts this evening, my dear.”

“Purely routine, Your Grace.”

“As are all of ours, my dear girl. That doesn’t make them less necessary.”

Stuart came up to them ten minutes later. “That’s all but the stragglers. You two should be off. Wellington will want you before noon, Malcolm.”