The Paris Affair (35 page)

“Do you?” She dropped the glove on the dressing table and started on the next one. “Do pray enlighten me.”

“Rannoch’s hoodwinked you into helping with his meddling. What’s he learned?”

The glove had caught on her emerald ring. She pulled it free. “You’ll have to ask him.”

“Don’t play games, Wilhelmine.” Stewart lurched towards her. She caught the fumes of brandy on his breath. “I need the truth.”

“Why?”

“Rannoch’s poking and prying and asking all manner of questions—”

“What is it to you?”

“Some things are best left well enough alone.”

“ ‘Some things’ meaning Antoine Rivère’s death? Or Bertrand Laclos’s?”

Rage flared in his eyes. She’d seen them lit with passion but never with so much anger. “You don’t know what you’re meddling in, Wilhelmine. I thought I could trust you.”

“What makes you think you can’t?”

He seized her wrist. Her pearl bracelet clattered to the floor. “I forbid you to have anything more to do with this.”

“Forbid?” She jerked her hand from his grip. “What makes you think you can forbid me to do anything?”

“You know what you are to me, Wilhelmine.”

“I know that I’m not your property. Or any man’s. First you ask me questions about what Malcolm and Suzanne are doing, then you tell me to have nothing to do with them—”

“I don’t want you exposed to lies.”

“I think you can trust me to know the difference between lies and the truth.”

“You don’t know what you’re in the midst of.”

“No, I don’t.” She fixed him with a hard stare. “Care to enlighten me?”

“This is no laughing matter.”

“No, it isn’t. If I hadn’t cared to uncover whatever’s going on before, I do now. You certainly know how to pique one’s curiosity.”

He gripped her shoulders. His fingers dug into her skin through the tulle and crêpe of her sleeves. “Don’t you dare—”

She wrenched away from him and stared into his hot eyes. “You’re terrified.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“For God’s sake, Stewart, what have you done?”

“I haven’t done anything. You—”

“For heaven’s sake. I can tell when you’re lying.”

“You don’t know where this could lead. What you’re doing to me.”

“Then tell me.” She reached for him and took his face between her hands. “Tell me what you’re afraid of. Let me help you.”

“I didn’t say—”

“You’re obviously terrified. Charlie, what have you done? What are you afraid of Malcolm learning? What’s so important—”

“Don’t meddle, Wilhelmine.”

“Is it about Bertrand Laclos?”

Rage and fear flared in Stewart’s eyes. “Damn it—”

“That’s it, isn’t it? Charlie, it’s dreadful he was framed, but no one can blame you. Even Malcolm believed he was guilty. Yes, you should have told Wellington about that letter from Laclos saying he wanted to give up his mission, but he was already dead when you received it. I can see—”

“Stop it, Willie.”

“I’m just telling you not to torture yourself. Unless there’s more.” She scanned his face. “What? Surely you didn’t suspect he was framed when you ordered him killed? Why on earth—”

“I told you to stop it.”

“I can’t believe you’d have knowingly ordered an innocent man’s death.”

“I didn’t.”

“Then what—”

“It’s none of your affair.”

“Of course it is. I care about you.”

“If you cared about me, you’d stop this folly.”

“How can I know it is folly? How can you? Unless you know—”

“You have no right to make accusations.”

“I have a right to ask what my lover is involved in.”

He gave a short laugh. “If you persist in this I won’t be your lover anymore.”

“For heaven’s sake—”

“I mean it, Wilhelmine. Persist in this folly and it’s over.”

Wilhelmine stared up at the man on whom she had pinned her hopes these past months. Security, position, the power of being a powerful man’s wife. The allure hadn’t gone. He was being tiresome, but the consequences of being alone hadn’t changed. For a moment her future hung before her eyes.

Pleasure. Secure comfort. An assured position. Set against freedom and loyalty. In the end it was no choice really. She lifted her chin. “It’s been a pleasant interlude.”

“What are you saying?”

She took a step back from him and her hopes for the future. “That it’s over.”

CHAPTER 31

One of the first things Suzanne had learned as a spy was that sometimes the safest place for a clandestine meeting is in the clear light of day. Sunlight spilled through the thick glass of the café’s windows as she and Malcolm stepped through the doors. She wore a light muslin gown and a peach sarcenet spencer and matching bonnet. Nothing overtly flashy, but there was no need to be in disguise for this mission. Or at least for this part of this mission.

She and Malcolm glanced round the linen-covered tables, crowded with a Latin Quarter assortment of students with books spread before them or stacked on the floor; older academics reading, writing, or talking; artists with sketch pads; chess and backgammon players; more than one actor studying a script. Easy enough to appear to be looking for a table. There were indeed few available.

“Rannoch.” Raoul looked up from a newspaper. He was at a table in the middle of the room but against the wall and slightly concealed by a sideboard that held bottles of wine and pitchers of water. “Mrs. Rannoch.”

Natural enough for Suzanne and Malcolm to thread their way across the room towards him.

“Do join me,” Raoul said. “I’d be glad of the company, and tables are in short supply.”

Suzanne slid into the chair Raoul was holding out for her, struck by the surreal nature of the scene. She was meeting Raoul to exchange information as she had hundreds of times in the past. But Malcolm was with her and there was no need to keep the meeting secret. At least not from Malcolm. It should have eased the knot of tension inside her. Instead her mouth was dry and her corset laces seemed to be cutting through her chemise and squeezing the breath from her lungs.

“Parisian cafés are a welcome escape from diplomatic crowds. But they present their own chaos.” Raoul raised a casual hand to signal a waiter across the room.

“But at least it’s less stuffy chaos.” Suzanne adjusted the muslin folds of her gown. This was Malcolm’s and Raoul’s scene. All she had to do was listen and respond, which sometimes was the hardest thing of all to accomplish. Especially when one was trying not to reveal anything to the expert spy at one’s side to whom one happened to be married.

The waiter shuffled over to their table, stopping to take two orders along the way. He was gray haired and stoop shouldered, his face dominated by a large nose and heavy jaw and set in the lines of disapproval with which many Parisians these days viewed foreigners.

Malcolm ordered café au lait for both of them. The waiter, seemingly hard of hearing, bent closer to take the order. In the same tones in which he had confirmed the order, he added, “Uniforms would work best. Easiest way to hide a man.”

Though Suzanne had been 90 percent sure the waiter was the Kestrel from the moment Raoul signaled him, surprise and admiration shot through her. This close she could tell the nose and jaw had been created with putty and the hair artificially turned gray, but only because she knew where to look. For all her training at looking beneath disguises, she would not have been able to recognize the man beneath the disguise or even to do a reasonable sketch of what he might look like. Nor would she have equated him with the man she had met in Manon Caret’s dressing room had she again not known to look.

“How many?” Malcolm asked, in the same tone he’d used to order the coffee.

“Four. I can provide the uniforms. We’ll need another two or three to have transport ready outside the city gates.”

Malcolm nodded. “We’ll be ready. Oh, and you might bring some biscuits with the coffee.”

“Biscuits? Oh, you mean gâteaux.” The Kestrel-as-waiter shook his head over foreign words and shuffled off.

Raoul shifted his position in his chair, setting his shoulders to the crowd behind them. “Do you know whom you can use?”

“We have Davenport,” Malcolm said, also shifting slightly in his chair to face away from the crowd. “And his wife. And Juliette Dubretton. And . . .” He hesitated. Suzanne could see him debating the wisdom of mentioning Wilhelmine and Dorothée. “One or two others.”

“And me.” Raoul took a sip of coffee.

“You’ve already risked a great deal, O’Roarke.”

“It’s my decision what I risk. You’re not in a position to turn down help, Rannoch.” Raoul’s long fingers curled round the handle of his coffee cup. “Unless you don’t trust me?”

“Of course not,” Malcolm said, with the ease of one who had known Raoul from boyhood and never doubted his loyalties. “But this isn’t your fight.”

“On the contrary. Opposing what’s happening in France now should be everyone’s fight.”

Suzanne kept her gaze moving between the two men. Malcolm might not know Raoul was a Bonapartist agent, but he had grown up hearing about Raoul’s involvement in the French Revolution and the United Irish Uprising. She felt an unexpected wash of comfort at the realization that in many ways the three of them were not so very far apart. At the same time it made keeping track of real and pretend roles that much more difficult.

“Still—,” Malcolm said.

Raoul shifted his cup on the worn white linen of the tablecloth. “I know of St. Gilles’s connection to Tatiana Kirsanova. I’ve heard rumors of your investigation. I can put the pieces together.”

Malcolm’s expression snapped closed. “I don’t—”

“I have no intention of spreading tales. But I have my own sense of obligation when it comes to Tatiana.”

Malcolm reached for his coffee cup. “I didn’t realize you knew her.”

“I rather think everyone knew Tatiana Kirsanova. But I didn’t know her well, it’s true. My interest in her goes back some years.” Raoul held Malcolm’s gaze across the table for a moment. “Your mother told me, Malcolm.”

Malcolm held every response in check, but Suzanne felt the shock that ran through him like a lightning strike.

“We were young enough to talk more freely than perhaps we should,” Raoul said, in a quiet, conversational tone that was somehow directed straight at Malcolm. “I don’t know the whole story. But I know enough to know what Tatiana Kirsanova must mean to you.”

“And—”

“Your mother was my friend. One of my oldest friends. I miss her. I can’t help but feel a certain debt to her children. All of them.”

Malcolm’s gaze lingered on Raoul. “If—”

The waiter shuffled back to their table and set down the cups of café au lait and a plate of almond cakes. “Do you require anything else, monsieur? Madame?”

“Perhaps some sugar?” Suzanne said with a smile.

The waiter sniffed, as though to indicate a true Parisienne wouldn’t sully her coffee with sweetener.

“Papers?” Malcolm asked.

“I’ll have them prepared. But they’d be safer if you could get an original seal.”

Malcolm inclined his head. “Shouldn’t be a problem. How much do you require in funds?”

“I have sufficient to set things in motion. We can settle up when your friend is safe.”

The waiter moved off. Raoul regarded Malcolm over the rim of his cup. “You’re risking a great deal, Rannoch.”

Malcolm blew on the steam rising from his café au lait. “You were just telling me this should be worth the risk to anyone.”

“Taking the seal moves the risk a step further.”

Malcolm shrugged and took a sip of coffee. “In for a penny.”

“You have a career to risk,” Raoul said. “In a way I no longer do.”

Which was even truer than Malcolm knew.

Malcolm grinned. “You’re sounding distinctly paternal, O’Roarke. I’m no longer the boy you introduced to Locke and Paine and had to keep from tumbling into the stream when we went fishing.”

“You must forgive the concern of someone who’s known you since childhood. But your diplomatic career is not something to risk idly.”

“I rarely do anything idly. But when it comes to risks to my career—” Malcolm stared into his coffee for a moment. “I don’t know how much longer I can stomach my diplomatic career in any event.”

Suzanne froze, her own cup halfway to her lips. She knew Malcolm’s increasing frustrations with his diplomatic role, but she had not heard him address it so directly.

Raoul regarded Malcolm steadily. “Carrying out others’ policy can be trying. All the more so when one has strong ideas of one’s own.”

“Quite.” Malcolm hesitated a moment, took another quick sip of coffee, spoke in a rush. “In Vienna I still thought I could achieve something arguing on the sidelines. I’m not sure how I deluded myself I could ever have any influence on Castlereagh or Wellington. Talk about arrogance. Perhaps I just needed a way to justify my choices. But now—One can only bang one’s head against a wall for so long without starting to feel one’s going mad. Or actually going mad.” He turned his cup in his hands. “It’s hard sometimes, not to wonder what we were fighting for.”

Raoul leaned back in his chair and regarded Malcolm for a long moment. For all she knew Raoul, for all the secrets they both kept from Malcolm, in that moment Suzanne felt she was the outsider while what passed between her husband and her former lover stretched back to Malcolm’s boyhood and a time before she had known either of them. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Or that I don’t sympathize. I always thought you were too independent a thinker to be happy for too long doing others’ bidding.”

“You have to feel it, too, O’Roarke.” Malcolm leaned forwards across the table. “You can’t tell me a Spain with the Bourbons restored and the liberals’ constitution revoked is what you were fighting for.”

Suzanne saw Raoul’s fingers whiten round his coffee cup. “No. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling distinctly as though I’ve been banging my head against a wall as well. But if you’ll permit a piece of advice from one who was playing this game before you were born, don’t let frustration turn into cynicism. It’s difficult to take the long view at thirty. But having survived the Revolution and the United Irish Uprising, I can say there’ll be a time you’ll be glad you didn’t throw your career away.”

It was remarkably similar to the advice he’d given Suzanne after Waterloo. How odd that in the wake of the upheaval of the past year the same advice should work for both her and Malcolm, for all they’d been on different sides.

“You mean I’ll be glad to still have a diplomatic career so I can exert influence when the climate turns more favorable?” Malcolm asked.

Raoul took a sip of coffee. “Perhaps. I was thinking more that you’ll be glad you didn’t land yourself in prison over a grand gesture.”

“I’m too much of a pragmatist for grand gestures, O’Roarke.”

“My dear Malcolm. You’re one of the most committed idealists I know.”

“Then you must move in a world of cynics, O’Roarke.”

The waiter returned and plunked down a bowl of sugar.

“How kind of you.” Suzanne, who never put sugar in her coffee, reached for her silver spoon.

The waiter sniffed. He bent over the table to adjust the vase of geraniums. “We’ll need someone to talk to the subject. Make arrangements. Can you get into the prison?”

“We’ll manage,” Malcolm said.

The waiter straightened up, ran his gaze over the table, sniffed again, and moved off to frown at the next table.

Suzanne took a sip of her sweetened coffee and managed not to grimace. Part of playing a role was learning to eat and drink things that weren’t to one’s own taste in the general run of things. “If you go to see St. Gilles, it will be entirely too obvious who’s behind his escape, darling.”

“I agree,” Malcolm said.

Both she and Raoul cast looks at him.

“Did you think I’d throw myself to the wolves?” he asked. “I’m neither so foolish nor so self-sacrificing. We need someone who can get into the Conciergerie in the general run of things.”

Suzanne met his gaze. “Rupert.”

Malcolm took a sip of coffee. “Rupert’s assisting his father, who’s interviewing those who’ve been proscribed. No one could question him going to see St. Gilles.”

“But if we ask for his help—”

“Quite.” Malcolm set down his cup with a clatter.

“You trust Caruthers?” Raoul asked.

“Trust is always a risk,” Malcolm said. “I’ve judged fairly well in the past, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering.”

Raoul regarded him for a moment. “The trick is weighing the risks.”

“And in Rupert’s case I think the risk is a fair one.” Malcolm paused as though surprised at the conviction in his own voice. “But these secrets aren’t mine to share.”

Raoul reached for his coffee cup. “Then I suggest you talk to Juliette Dubretton.”

Malcolm inclined his head.

The waiter returned to the table. “We’ll have to get the wife and children out of the city. Otherwise they could become hostages. You’ll need someone to run that side of things.” His gaze moved to Suzanne for a moment. Not by a flicker of an eyelid did he reveal he had met her before, but she was sure he remembered.

“We’ll arrange it,” she said.

“They should leave before St. Gilles, but ideally only by a matter of hours. Otherwise their disappearance could alert Fouché to an escape attempt.”

Malcolm nodded.

“O’Roarke knows how to contact me.” The waiter straightened up. “Anything else?”

“Nothing. You’ve been so kind.” Suzanne gave him the demure smile of an expatriate diplomatic wife.

The waiter sniffed at the strange ways of foreigners and shuffled off.

 

Malcolm tucked Suzanne’s arm through his own and glanced up and down the street. “I think it can work.”

“If everything goes according to plan.”

A smile pulled at his mouth. “Well, that’s always the case.”

“Or even if it doesn’t.” She tightened her gloved fingers round his arm. “We’re good at improvising.” She studied his profile for a moment. “Darling—”

“Don’t you start with the cautions as well. O’Roarke was bad enough.”

“No. We’ve never tried to stop each other from running risks. But—” She scanned the face she knew so well for all the secrets between them. “But I’ve never heard you talk as you did to Mr. O’Roarke.”