The Paris Affair (25 page)

“You’re married to Juliette Dubretton,” Suzanne said.

“You know my wife?”

“I’ve read her books. In England she’s called the French Mary Wollstonecraft. Which rather shows a British perspective.”

St. Gilles smiled. “It’s an apt comparison. Like William Godwin with Mary Wollstonecraft, I had a damnable time convincing Juliette to marry me. Tania was very kind about my crying on her shoulder.”

Malcolm took a sip of wine. “You confided in Tatiana.”

“Is that so hard to imagine?”

“No. Tania could be disarming. And a good listener when she put her mind to it. I’m wondering if she also confided in you.”

“We were friends,” St. Gilles said in an even voice. “We talked.”

Malcolm hesitated. When it came to Tania, the instinct to secrecy was still deeply ingrained. Suzanne and Wilhelmine were silent, leaving the decision to him. “Did Tania tell you she was pregnant?” he asked.

St. Gilles flung back his head and gave another laugh. “Tania? Pregnant? Don’t you think all Paris would have known?”

“Not if she’d gone away and had the child in secret.”

St. Gilles went still. “My God. You’re serious.”

Malcolm leaned forwards and held St. Gilles with his gaze, the look he’d used to win confidences from everyone from diplomats across the negotiating table to murder suspects. “We have reason to believe Tania left Paris and gave birth to a child in the country. She gave the child up, but she appears to have known where he or she was and sent gifts. She was at great pains to keep the child’s existence a secret.”

St. Gilles ran a hand through his hair. “That would have been—”

“The child would have been conceived in late 1806 or possibly early 1807,” Suzanne said.

St. Gilles picked up the bottle and splashed some more wine into his glass, frowning at the pale gold liquid. “It’s not as though she gave me a list of her conquests.”

“But—,” Malcolm said.

“One couldn’t but notice the court that surrounded her. She’d tell amusing stories about her cavaliers. I never knew which, if any, shared her bed.”

“But there was someone else, wasn’t there?” It was Wilhelmine’s turn to lean forwards.

St. Gilles frowned at the splotches of paint on a canvas across the room. “It may mean nothing. One can make a child as easily in one night with a chance acquaintance as one can in the arms of the love of one’s life.” He took a thoughtful sip of wine. “Not that I’d necessarily say he was the love of her life.”

“But he might have been?” Malcolm asked, gaze trained on St. Gilles.

“She said once that she thought he might be. I laughed, because I was sure she was making a joke. Tatiana laughed as well. But from the look in her eyes, I suddenly wondered if perhaps she hadn’t been joking after all.”

“Who?” Malcolm said. His breath seemed to have caught in his throat.

St. Gilles took another sip of wine. “He called himself Jean Leblanc.”

“Called himself?”

“Claimed to be a law student from Provence. By the time I’d shared a bottle of Burgundy with him and Tatiana I was sure that was a fabrication. I went so far as to warn Tania about him. But she kissed my cheek and told me not to be silly. Which I took to mean she knew who he was. And Leblanc seemed a decent sort. Far more decent than—” He bit back the words.

“Than Tania?” Malcolm asked with a smile.

St. Gilles met his gaze squarely. “You knew her.”

“Just so. Though I wouldn’t have said a decent man was the sort to appeal to her.”

“No.” St. Gilles frowned, as though turning over memories. “This was different, as I said before. Leblanc seemed a serious sort. Always a bit preoccupied. But quite charming. And obviously in love with Tania. Unlike Tania, he made no effort to hide it. I decided there wasn’t anything significant to worry about and Tania could take care of herself.” His fingers tightened round his glass. “More fool me. It was weeks before I learned who he really was.”

“Who?” Malcolm asked.

“Laclos.”

“Bertrand Laclos?” Wilhelmine said with a gasp of disbelief. “But he wouldn’t have been in Paris yet.”

“Not Bertrand. His elder brother.”

“Tatiana was in love with Étienne Laclos?” Malcolm said.

St. Gilles gave a faint smile. “The closest she came to admitting it was that joke that may not have been a joke. But Tatiana was Étienne Laclos’s lover, yes. Not that I knew him as Étienne Laclos at the time.”

“He was in France in secret, wasn’t he?” Suzanne said. “Involved in a plot against Napoleon.”

“So I later learned. I—” St. Gilles broke off at the opening of the door. A tall, dark-haired woman stepped into the room and paused on the threshold. She wore a gown of brown-spotted muslin and her hair was drawn back into a simple chignon. Her brows were strongly marked, her cheekbones high, her mouth full lipped, her eyes radiating shrewd intelligence. An attractive woman who employed no obvious arts to attract.

“I didn’t realize you had guests,” she said.

“I fear we arrived unexpectedly and have been quite monopolizing your husband, Madame St. Gilles,” Wilhelmine said. “Or do you prefer ‘Mademoiselle Dubretton’?”

“I answer to both.” Juliette Dubretton stepped into the room. She looked to be in her midthirties, with deepest dark eyes, fine-boned features, and tawny skin that suggested Spanish origins.

Wilhelmine introduced Malcolm and Suzanne. “I’m an admirer of your writing,” Suzanne said, shaking hands.

“You’re very kind, Madame Rannoch. But I wonder if your husband would thank me.”

“Actually, it was my husband who introduced me to your books.”

Juliette Dubretton ran a frank gaze over Malcolm. “You’re evidently an intriguing man, Monsieur Rannoch.”

“Merely a man who recognizes good sense when he reads it.”

Juliette’s gaze moved from Malcolm and Suzanne to her husband. “Flattered as I am, I seem to have interrupted. Shall I leave?”

“No, no,” St. Gilles said. “It’s not as though we have secrets, and you may be able to help. They’ve come in search of information about Tatiana Kirsanova.”

“Poor Tatiana.” Juliette perched on the arm of her husband’s chair. “She was very kind to Paul when I fear I was being rather tiresomely prickly about how I couldn’t compromise my principles with matrimony. Is this about her death?”

“More about her life,” Malcolm said. “It seems she may have had a child.”

Juliette’s dark eyes widened.
“Mon Dieu
.
”

St. Gilles caught his wife up on the discussion. Juliette listened in frowning silence. “I only met Leblanc—Laclos—once or twice, but he seemed to me a man quite out of his depth. With Tatiana and with whatever had brought him to Paris. But I think Paul is right. Tatiana did seem to care for him.” Her fingers twined round her husband’s. “When one’s in love oneself one notices such things.”

St. Gilles shot her a smile and lifted her hand to his lips. “Not that you’d have gone so far as to admit you were in love at the time.”

Her smile was a private sort of answer. “Well, perhaps not to you.”

“Did Tatiana know about Étienne Laclos’s plot?” Malcolm asked.

“I’m not sure,” St. Gilles said, returning the pressure of his wife’s hand. “She and Leblanc—Laclos—kept their liaison secret. They met at my studio often, but naturally I took care to make myself scarce when they did. Then one night they hammered at the door at three in the morning. I slept in the studio in those days. Tania said Leblanc was in trouble and could I hide him. He left the next morning disguised as an old woman with bits of costume I keep for my pictures. By evening he’d been arrested and thrown in the Conciergerie. Though I didn’t realize the Étienne Laclos who’d been arrested for plotting against the emperor was Jean Leblanc until Tania came to see me again and spilled out the whole. Surprisingly effusive for Tania. I suppose her desperation could be taken as yet more proof that she loved him.”

“She tried to save him?” Malcolm asked.

“After being so determined to keep their liaison a secret, she used every bit of influence she had. And then she tried to plan a rescue. She asked me to help.” He gave a wry smile. “You can appreciate the irony. I got in a fair amount of trouble with the Bonaparte government, but if there was anything to push me back to being a committed Bonapartist it was a Royalist plot.” He glanced round the company. “No offense meant.”

“None taken,” Malcolm said.

“I painted most of the Bonaparte family,” St. Gilles said. “Bonaparte, Josephine, Hortense and her children, Eugène, Jerome, Pauline twice. There’s nothing like trying to capture someone on canvas to make them seem like a real person. Which rather complicates the idea of violence against the state.”

Juliette shivered. “I was never much of an admirer of Bonaparte, but murder is murder. At the time of the plot, Hortense had just lost her little boy and come to Paris with her younger son. They would have been at Malmaison. If the plan had succeeded it could well have killed not just Napoleon but Josephine and Hortense and her child—Once I had children of my own, I could understand Bonaparte’s determination to exact vengeance.” She hesitated, her gaze on Malcolm.

“I’m aware British gold funded the mission,” Malcolm said. “Not our finest hour.” He looked at St. Gilles. “But somehow I don’t think you refused to help Tania when she asked you to assist Étienne?”

“Oh no. I agreed, as Tania knew I would. What are principles when one has desperate friends before one?”

“What happened?” Suzanne asked.

“The jailer she’d bribed came down with a fever, Laclos was moved to a different cell. A tragedy of errors.”

“She must have been angry. Tania hated to lose.”

“So she did. But this was more than anger. I’d never seen her so devastated, before or since. She stayed with me for two days.”

“I still remember the sound of her sobs,” Juliette said. “I doubt she cried often.”

“She didn’t,” Malcolm said.

St. Gilles took a long swallow of wine. “After the night Étienne Laclos died, she never talked about him again.”

“And then she left Paris?” Wilhelmine asked.

“A few months later.”

Wilhelmine set down her wineglass. “Long enough for her to have discovered she was with child.”

“Possibly. But—Forgive me, but even knowing Tatiana, even if she loved Leblanc—Laclos . . .” St. Gilles hesitated, glanced from Wilhelmine to Suzanne to Malcolm. “I doubt he was the only man whose bed she was sharing.”

“But perhaps the only man she cared for enough to forget to take precautions,” Suzanne said.

St. Gilles gave her a look of surprise and slowly nodded. “Perhaps.”

Juliette reached for her husband’s wineglass and took a sip. “It’s true. Tatiana wasn’t the sort of woman to run risks in the service of passion.”

“If the child was Étienne Laclos’s, do you know why Tatiana would have been at such pains to keep it secret?” Malcolm asked.

“Aside from the fact that its father had died a traitor?” St. Gilles said.

“The Bonaparte régime may be accused of overzeal, but I haven’t heard of them avenging themselves on the children of traitors.”

“No. That’s true.”

“Do you know of anyone else she might have confided in?”

“Not Tania,” St. Gilles said. “She wasn’t the confiding sort, as you must know yourself. As to Laclos, I’d tell you to ask his confederate in the plot. Save that he’s no longer here to ask.”

“His confederate?” Malcolm leaned forwards. “He was also executed?”

“No, he escaped detection. I only knew of his involvement thanks to Laclos himself. But he died three days ago. It was Antoine Rivère.”

CHAPTER 20

“I hate coincidences,” Suzanne said. “They always make me feel as though I’m missing something.”

“We’re undoubtedly missing a damned sight too much.” Malcolm took a sip of coffee. The two of them and Wilhelmine had repaired to a café when they left St. Gilles’s studio to collect themselves and talk over what they’d learned.

“If Étienne Laclos was the father of Tatiana’s child, this could explain how Rivère knew of it,” Wilhelmine said, stirring her café au lait. “Étienne could have confided in Rivère about the affair. He might even have known Tatiana was pregnant.” She looked at Malcolm. “She didn’t—”

“Tell me any of this? No.” Malcolm’s mouth hardened.

Suzanne reached across the table to touch his hand. “You weren’t here. And she couldn’t very well have written to you about it. She’d have put Laclos at risk. Besides, I doubt she was the sort to write confiding letters. Any more than you are.”

Malcolm thought of the handful of letters, most of them coded, that were all he had left of his sister. “True enough.”

Suzanne squeezed his fingers. “But even granted that’s how Rivère might have learned of the child, we still have the coincidence of Rivère also knowing about Étienne Laclos’s brother being framed for treason five years later.”

Malcolm sat back in his chair, sifting the pieces in his head. It was like a chessboard that had been scattered midgame, so that the strategy of the players was indecipherable. “According to Rupert, Lord Dewhurst instigated the plot. Étienne had been working as Dewhurst’s secretary and Dewhurst provided the funding. And Dewhurst was also behind Bertrand’s returning to France as a British agent.”

“You aren’t suggesting Lord Dewhurst was somehow trying to get rid of both the Laclos brothers, are you?” Wilhelmine asked.

She had stumbled startlingly close to the mark, at least in Bertrand’s case. Malcolm couldn’t think of why Dewhurst would have wanted to get rid of Étienne. “No,” he said. “But I do think I need to talk to Dewhurst.”

“Malcolm—” Wilhelmine took a sip of café au lait and frowned into the cup. “Do you think Tatiana was involved in a plot to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte?”

Malcolm checked the instinctive denial that rose to his lips. True, Tatiana had been Talleyrand’s creature. But not exclusively. She played all sides, and she was quite capable of making her own choices for personal ends. He drew a breath. “With Tania, I can never be sure of anything.”

 

Juliette Dubretton listened to the sound of their guests’ footsteps fading down the stairs. The scrape of the door opening and closing. These days in Paris caution was ingrained in one. She leaned against the wall between two canvases and surveyed her husband, who was still standing beside the door. “I like them. I wouldn’t have thought I would.”

Paul turned from the door to face her. “Wilhelmine of Sagan is unquestionably an aristocrat, but an interesting woman. The Rannochs are more surprising. It’s rare to meet a man who can laugh at his world.”

“And she doesn’t come from that world at all.”

“How do you know?”

“Observation. Madame Rannoch has eyes that have seen things no gently bred girl observes.” Juliette watched her husband for a moment, a host of considerations shifting in the scales in her mind. “You must be thinking what I’m thinking.”

Paul lifted his brows. “Romantic as the idea of two minds being in tune is, I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about. Which perhaps isn’t surprising given that I’m scarcely a romantic.”

“You’re the world’s last romantic,
mon cher,
but don’t try to change the subject.” She drew a breath, because even to put it into words was one step down an irreversible course. “You have to be wondering if we should have told them.”

She saw the jolt of tension that ran through her husband before he strolled across the room and picked up his wineglass. “You’re suggesting I’ve given way to madness as well as being a romantic?”

“It’s not funny, Paul.” She locked her hands together behind her back, gripping the hard gold of her wedding band. The bond she’d resisted, the bond that now anchored her life. “We can’t keep the secret forever.”

“For God’s sake, Julie.” Paul spun round to face her. “That’s exactly what we have to do. What we agreed to do. There’s too much at stake.”

She studied his face, the father of her children, the man for whom she had abandoned her principles, the best man she had ever met. “This changes things.”

He tossed down a swallow of wine. “Just because they like your books—”

“That damn well has nothing to do with it.” She crossed the room and caught his arm. “I don’t like what the lies are doing to me. To you. I can see where this is leading us.”

He looked down at her, his eyes unexpectedly dark with fear. Paul was not a man who frightened easily. “And if we told the truth? Where would that lead us?”

She swallowed, because she wasn’t sure herself and the question made her throat go tight and her blood run colder than the Seine in winter. But she kept her gaze on her husband’s face, because she wasn’t one to shirk hard truths. “I don’t know. But I think we have to take the risk.”

“Not with this.” He took an impatient step across the room. “Christ, Juliette—”

“Paul.” She closed the distance between them and caught his face between her hands. “Every breath we breathe is a risk these days.”

“All the more reason—”

“I didn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t understand the implications and how it could affect others. It now seems very selfish—”

He put up his hands to cover her own. “That’s foolishness,
ma belle
. You have nothing to reproach yourself with. If I hadn’t—”

“It’s not the time for regrets,
mon amour
.”

He ran a hand over her hair. His fingers trembled against her scalp. “You’re a remarkable woman, Juliette.”

“Hardly.” She looked into his eyes, seeing the man she’d met ten years ago in Café Belles Lettres, a sketch pad in his lap, a notebook at his elbow. “But I think I’m strong enough to face the past. And I think the man I fell in love with is as well.”

He looked down at her for a long moment. She could feel his breath warm on her face and words of acquiescence trembling on his lips. Then he wrenched away from her and strode across the room. “I know what I owe you, Juliette. I’d give my life for you. But I can’t do this. Don’t ask it of me.”

 

Lord Dewhurst looked up at Malcolm from behind the mahogany and brass of his desk. His gaze hardened. “If you’ve come to make more damned accusations, Rannoch, I have nothing to say to you. Rupert can talk to me to my face if he wishes.”

“Rupert didn’t send me.” Malcolm closed the door and advanced into the office. It smelled of good ink, old leather, and older brandy and was heavy with gilt and expensive fabric. “I don’t believe he has any wish to talk to you at all.”

“If it’s about Laclos—”

“It’s not.” Malcolm stopped three paces from the desk. “At least not about Bertrand.”

Dewhurst’s brows lifted. “What the devil—”

“Nine years ago, you were behind a plot to bring down Napoleon.”

Dewhurst’s gaze flickered to the side, then narrowed. “We were at war with France at the time. Damn it, if we could have removed Bonaparte—”

“I didn’t come here to argue the morality of covert operations. Wellington may have caviled at shooting Bonaparte on the field at Waterloo, but this was hardly the only plot our government financed to bring him down. You sent Étienne Laclos as your emissary.”

Dewhurst grimaced. “Étienne was an able young man. A bit too much of an idealist, perhaps, but he’d have grown out of that. It was tragic what happened. Why do you care?”

“Because I’ve just learned that Antoine Rivère was his confederate.”

Shock shot through Dewhurst’s eyes. Shock but not surprise. “Who told you that?”

“Are you saying it isn’t true?”

Dewhurst gave a short laugh. “You wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

“No. That’s true enough.”

Dewhurst pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “Damn it, Malcolm, you can’t think—”

“I think anything to do with Rivère may have a bearing on why he was killed.”

Dewhurst spun away.

“I didn’t realize Rivère reported to you in his work as a British agent,” Malcolm said.

“He didn’t.” The words seemed to be dragged from Dewhurst’s throat. “He reported to Carfax. Carfax suggested him for the mission.”

“So you and Carfax devised the plot against Bonaparte together?”

“Has there been any British intelligence mission in the past thirty years that Carfax hasn’t known about?”

“A point. Did the plot start with you or him?”

“As it happens it started with Étienne.” Dewhurst leaned against a marble-topped pier table that supported a candelabrum and a globe. Some of the tension left his shoulders. He seemed to almost enjoy reliving the planning of the mission. “His cousin had written to him that Bonaparte could be vulnerable.”

“His cousin? Not Gui?”

“No, Gui had been sent to England long since. Christian. His father was the third Laclos brother. That branch of the family had stayed in France and managed to survive the Terror. In fact, Christian was employed in the foreign ministry. He and Étienne corresponded secretly. Christian wrote to Étienne that he’d been sent to Malmaison with papers and it was amazing there wasn’t more security. Étienne repeated it to me. I don’t think either he or Christian saw the operational implications.”

“But you did.”

“I could hardly fail to do so. It isn’t often something drops into one’s lap like that. I went to Carfax. He suggested Rivère would be a good source and that he was practical enough to keep the two Laclos cousins in line.”

Malcolm moved round the side of the desk to where he could once again face Dewhurst directly. “So you packed Étienne off to Paris with British gold.”

“Naturally we funded the mission.”

“Was anyone else involved besides the three of them?”

“Not to my knowledge.” Dewhurst flicked a piece of dried wax off the candelabrum. “It seemed safer to keep it small.”

“What went wrong?”

Dewhurst’s brows drew together. “I don’t know. Someone betrayed them.”

“They didn’t make a mistake and betray themselves?”

“That’s what I thought at first. Étienne and Christian were both untried. But they’d managed quite well until that point. Everything was proceeding apace. Then all hell broke loose.”

“But Étienne was the only one caught.”

“He didn’t break and betray his comrades. A splendid young man, as I said.”

“And perhaps in this case being an idealist served him well.”

“Perhaps.” Dewhurst frowned at the dried wax on the marble of the table. “There was one thing.”

“What?”

“The gold we’d sent with Étienne to fund the mission. It disappeared.”

“Into someone’s pockets?”

“One can’t but wonder.”

“Rivère?”

Dewhurst swept the wax fragments into his hand, then crossed the room to dump them into a bin beside the desk. “If so, there’s no record of him ever spending it. You didn’t find it when you searched his rooms, did you?”

Malcolm shook his head.

“There’s no record of Christian Laclos spending it, either.”

Malcolm hesitated, weighing risks and rewards, then said, “Did you know Étienne was involved with Tatiana Kirsanova?”

Dewhurst straightened up from the bin and stared at him. “The Russian princess? The one who was murdered in Vienna?”

Malcolm swallowed. “Yes. She was also an agent.”

“For us?”

“For Talleyrand. He sent her to work with us in the Peninsula.”

“Talleyrand sent a French agent to work with us during the war—”

“She wasn’t a French agent, she was his personal agent. And he was out of power and making overtures to the British at the time. But T—Princess Tatiana also struck out on her own and worked for the highest bidder.”

“You think she was working with Étienne?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible she was merely his lover. Though Princess Tatiana was rarely merely anything.”

Dewhurst tapped his fingers on the desktop. “I never heard that Étienne had a mistress. Though it’s not the sort of thing he’d have communicated with me about. Do you think it was Tatiana Kirsanova who betrayed the plot?”

That possibility had, of course, occurred to Malcolm from the first, but he kept his face impassive. “There’s nothing to suggest that.”

“If she’s as good as you say there wouldn’t be.” Dewhurst leaned against the desk, facing Malcolm. “Someone betrayed them. You say Princess Tatiana was Talleyrand’s creature. Perhaps he put her up to the affair to keep tabs on the conspirators.”

“Assuming he wanted to protect Napoleon. At that point in Talleyrand’s career, it’s difficult to say what he wanted when it came to the emperor.”

“Or perhaps someone else put her up to it. The woman was obviously an unscrupulous adventuress—” Dewhurst bit the words back, though Malcolm doubted the other man could have actually seen his nails digging into his palms. “Forgot the talk about the two of you. But damn it, Rannoch, even if she was your mistress you can’t have illusions about her.”

“No. That is, no, she wasn’t my mistress, and no, I’m quite free of illusions where Tatiana Kirsanova is concerned.” Though he wasn’t entirely sure that was true.

“Well then.”

“She hid Étienne Laclos the night the plot was discovered.”

“But he was caught all the same.” Dewhurst rested his hands behind him on the desk, a man in command of the setting and the situation. “Perhaps she led the conspirators right to him. Hiding him would be a good way of making sure she knew where he was.”

That, of course, had also occurred to Malcolm when St. Gilles first told them the story. “And reportedly she was devastated by his death.”