The Paris Affair (6 page)

“Not until after he died. The circumstances of his death were suspicious. And we’d intercepted a communication that suggested the British might have been behind it. I searched his rooms. I found evidence he’d been working with the British—well concealed, but there was one coded letter locked away that I decoded.”

“The British thought—”

“That he’d been a double working for us all along. Extraordinary.”

“He wasn’t?” Suzanne studied his face, trying to peel away layers of defense and pretense. She could almost always tell when Raoul was speaking the truth. Almost. But not invariably.

“No.” Raoul’s voice was flat.

“Can you be sure? You didn’t run the only network in the Peninsula.”

“But I knew the others who did. I made inquiries after Laclos’s death. I’m as sure as I can be. Someone wanted him out of the way.”

“Not the French?”

“We didn’t know he was a double,” Raoul pointed out. “Besides, we wouldn’t have used such convoluted methods. I’d say someone British wanted him dead. British and highly placed.”

“Did you find anything in his rooms to suggest who?”

“A love letter to an R. Seemingly a longtime lover in an affair that went beyond the trifling. But there were impediments to their being together.”

“So if R. had a jealous husband—”

“It’s one possibility.”

Suzanne turned the stem of her wineglass between her fingers. “Malcolm intercepted the documents that incriminated Laclos.”

Raoul’s mouth tightened. “Malcolm will take that hard. He still thinks one can be a spy and maintain one’s integrity.”

She jerked her chin up and met Raoul’s gaze. “He manages far better than most agents.”

“Yes. I should think it’s a large part of why you love him.”

She felt herself flush. “Rivère had other information. This was just the first thing he tried as leverage.” She tightened her fingers round her glass, willing them to be steady. “Malcolm and Harry Davenport are searching his rooms.”

Raoul’s gaze moved over her face, at once sharp and gentle. “You’re asking me if he knew about you?”

She swallowed. “Could he have?”

Raoul reached across the table and touched her hand. “I very much doubt it.”

“But you can’t be sure. Of course.” She forced a sip of wine down her throat. “Malcolm will talk to Fouché about Bertrand Laclos.”

“You shouldn’t have anything to fear from Fouché.” Raoul’s mouth lifted in a faint smile. “Which may be the first time I’ve ever said that about him.”

The wine lingered bitter in her throat. “You can’t be sure—”

“I never used your name with Fouché. And I never told him one of my agents had married a British diplomat.”

She looked into the familiar gray eyes that always seemed to hold surprises. “Why not?”

“No need to share information when not necessary. Particularly not with a man like Fouché. Besides, I thought that eventually—”

“Eventually what?”

He picked up the bottle and refilled her nearly full glass. “I thought that one way or another you’d want to preserve your marriage. The fewer people who knew the truth of your past the better.”

The rattle of dice, the rustle of newspaper, and the slosh of wine being poured echoed in the stillness. She could see Raoul’s cool, dispassionate gaze in a Lisbon plaza the day they’d discussed Malcolm’s proposal of marriage to her. “You thought—I went into my marriage to spy on the British through Malcolm. How could you possibly guess I’d want to preserve it?”

Raoul reached for his own glass. “What were you planning? To walk away one day when you’d got all the information you could from your husband? And take your son with you?”

“No. Yes. That is—” Her throat tightened. “The truth is I scarcely thought of the future at all.” Shame washed over her like a bucketful of icy water.

He gave a faint smile. “Understandable. We were trying to win a war. The present objective seems all that matters. But I’m rather older than you. I knew the war would end eventually, one way or another, interminable as it seemed.”

“And you thought I’d want to stay with Malcolm.” She held his gaze with her own, trying to pin down some core of truth within its depths.

“I thought it likely.”

“It was only a year ago that I realized I loved him.”

His gaze remained on her own, steady and unusually open. “It was perhaps obvious to an outside observer rather sooner.”

Her mouth curled. Raoul, committed to his cause, was the last to focus on personal relationships. Unless of course he thought he could gain by them. “Next you’ll be saying you foresaw a happy ending.”

“Is that so extraordinary? Though of course the story’s still unfolding.”

“I’m not the happily ever after sort.” She ran her finger over a wine stain in the tablecloth. “I knew it would be hard. Seeing foreign soldiers overrun Paris. I didn’t realize quite how hard it would be.”

His hand slid partway across the table, then stilled. “You aren’t alone,
querida
. However it may seem.”

“Aren’t agents always alone?”

“We aren’t agents in everything we do.”

She studied his face. There were new lines round his eyes and mouth since Waterloo, but the real scars of the battle showed when she looked into his eyes. “I keep hearing about more names on the proscribed list,” she said. “It’s difficult to take in.”

“Yes.” He snatched up his glass and took a long swallow of wine.

“Raoul?” She watched him closely. “That’s what you’ve been doing, isn’t it? Helping friends get out of Paris.”

His gaze fastened on the vase of bloodred geraniums on the table. “Difficult as it may be to maintain integrity in the espionage business, I’ve always felt a certain loyalty to my people. Losing a battle—even a war—doesn’t change that.” He reached for his glass again. “Forgive me. It’s been a difficult day.”

She stared at him. She used to be quicker. She’d been too absorbed by her own concerns. Now she saw the strain in the set of his mouth and the worry at the back of his eyes. “Who?”

“Who what?” He took another swallow of wine.

“You’re worried about someone new. Someone who’s been proscribed? Or is about to be. I should have seen it.”

“Querida
—
”

She sat back against the bench, hit by the reality of how much things had changed. “You don’t trust me.” It was as though a well-worn cloak had been lifted from her shoulders on a cold day. “Can you honestly think I would betray one of our comrades—”

“I trust you with my life,” he said in a low, rough voice. “I’m trying to keep you from the intolerable burden of divided loyalties, my darling idiot.”

“It’s a bit late for that. You let me marry Malcolm. Not that I’m sorry you did.”

He kept his gaze on her face. “And I’m trying to avoid doing more damage to your marriage.”

“Since when have you been so driven by personal concerns?”

“Perhaps since personal concerns became all that are left to us. Or perhaps you had a somewhat exaggerated view of my ruthlessness.”

“You’ve quite neatly managed to change the subject.” She leaned forwards. “I won’t let you wrap me in cotton wool any more than I’ll let Malcolm do so.” That had become doubly important to her since she had left the work that had been the focus of her life for so long. “Who are you worried about now?”

Raoul released his breath in a harsh sigh. “Manon Caret.”

Suzanne drew a sharp breath. “But she’s—”

“No longer untouchable. She may still reign over Paris from the Comédie-Française, but that won’t hold much weight with Fouché.”

Suzanne swallowed. “Fouché knows Manon was a Bonapartist agent?”

“More to the point, others do and have denounced her. He’ll look soft if he doesn’t move against her. With the Ultra Royalists claiming he’s too moderate—God help us—he can’t afford any hint of softness. And I suspect he’s worried about what she knows.”

Suzanne shook her head at the idea of Manon Caret, the celebrated actress who had kept Raoul apprised of the doings of Royalists for years, facing arrest. “She’s on the proscribed list?”

“No, and I doubt she ever will be. Too many embarrassing questions. I doubt there’ll even be a trial. But Fouché’s planning to take her into custody. She’ll quietly disappear, probably never to be seen again.”

Suzanne nodded. Spies were rarely dealt with through official channels. “When?”

“According to my sources we have a week at most.”

Suzanne stared at the candlelight flickering in the depths of her wineglass. They had drunk Bordeaux the night she first met Manon Caret. Suzanne had been sixteen, raw from the dubious results of her first mission. Raoul had taken her along when he went to meet with Manon at the theatre late one evening. They’d watched the last act of
The Marriage of Figaro,
joined the throng of Manon’s admirers after the performance, then lingered on in her dressing room. Suzanne still recalled Manon going behind a gilt-edged dressing screen and emerging in a froth of sapphire silk and Valençiennes lace, despite the frivolous garment somehow transformed from charming, imperious actress to hardheaded agent. Hardheaded agent who had been remarkably kind to a sixteen-year-old girl still feeling her way in the espionage business, far more uncertain than she would admit to anyone, even herself.

She had drunk in the talk of the seasoned spies that night, as they sat round a branch of candles and a bottle of wine, surrounded by costumes and feathered masks and the smell of powder and greasepaint. She had met Manon a handful of times in the next two years, though Suzanne’s work had been on the Peninsula. And then, in 1811, Suzanne had been called upon to assist Hortense Bonaparte, the Empress Josephine’s daughter and Napoleon’s brother’s wife, who found herself with child by her lover. Suzanne had thought they were safe when Hortense delivered the baby safely in Switzerland and gave it into the care of her lover’s mother. But returned to Paris, Suzanne had learned that evidence about the child had fallen into the hands of agents in the ministry of police, still loyal to Fouché, though he was out of power at the time. Fouché had long been an enemy of Josephine and despite—or because of—the fact that Napoleon had divorced her and Fouché himself had been forced from the ministry of police, Fouché wouldn’t have hesitated to use the information about the child against Hortense or her mother. Suzanne had stolen the papers from the ministry of police before the agents could send them to Fouché. But she had had difficulty slipping out of the ministry. With a knife wound in her side and one of the agents on her trail, she had sought refuge at the Comédie-Française with Manon. If she’d been caught with the stolen papers in her possession, she’d have faced prison and very likely execution as a spy, no matter that she was working for the French. Manon had dressed her wound between scenes, bundled her into a costume, and hidden her in plain sight onstage as one of Phèdre’s ladies-in-waiting. All at considerable risk to herself.

Suzanne snatched up her glass and took a sip of wine. “Manon probably saved my life. I’ve never forgot it.”

“Nor have I.” Raoul’s mouth turned grim.

One would almost think he blamed himself for her predicament that night, save that that was so very unlike Raoul. Suzanne pushed aside the thought. “What are you planning?”

“Suzanne—”

“You must have a plan.”

He hesitated a moment. “I’ve made contact with the Kestrel.”

“The who? One of your former agents?” It wasn’t like Raoul to go in for fanciful code names.

He shook his head. “Not one of mine. Or anyone’s. He works for himself. For some years he wreaked havoc by rescuing Royalists from our prisons or from certain arrest.”

“And now he’s rescuing Bonapartists?”

“He claims to deplore wanton killing.”

“And you believe him?”

“I don’t have many other options. He was behind the rescue of Combre and Lefèvre’s escape.”

She leaned forwards. “I can help you.”

“No.” His voice cut across the table with quiet force.

“Since when have you been one to refuse aid? I assure you, I haven’t let myself grow rusty.”

Raoul’s gaze darkened. “For God’s sake, Suzanne. You have a husband, a son, a life. To be protected, for all the reasons you so cogently explained when you told me you were stopping your work.”

“This is different. Stopping my work doesn’t mean turning my back on my comrades.”

“The risk is still there.”

She gave a laugh, rough in her throat. “We live with risk.”

“You don’t have to anymore.”

She stared at him across the geraniums. “This isn’t like you.”

“Perhaps Waterloo changed me. Or perhaps I’ve always been less Machiavellian than you were inclined to believe.”

She pulled her wineglass closer. She’d loved Raoul, but she’d always known she couldn’t trust herself to him. Had her judgment of him been a form of defense, a way of protecting herself from disappointment? “I need to help. I need to do this.”

“Querida
—
”
His gaze turned soft, in that way that always disconcerted her. “You don’t owe anyone anything. Least of all me. And Manon would tell you she knew the risks.”

Suzanne drew a harsh breath. For a moment, the table and the wineglass, the bottle and the vase of geraniums swam before her eyes. She saw Manon’s daughters, asleep on the sofa in the room that adjoined her dressing room. Then she saw Colin, eating a boiled egg with concentration when she had breakfast with him before she left the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré this morning. “I have to help, Raoul. Or I’ll go mad.”

“Why—”

“Because I’m safe. Or safer than most of us. Because I live in luxury, with the man I love and my child. Because I dine and dance with the victors and even count some of them as friends. Because for hours together I forget who I am and what I fought for. I forget that we lost.”