Teresa Grant (22 page)

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Authors: Imperial Scandal

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“This must be what Vedrin gave Dumont,” Davenport said.
“What—?” Stuart asked.
“Funding, I suspect,” Malcolm said. “They were smuggling jewels out of Brussels to support Bonaparte.”
Wellington stared down at the glittering necklace. “So Johnny Ashton’s wife was helping supply funds to Napoleon Bonaparte. Funds which Bonaparte is even now using to march against us. We’re about to fight an emperor, and now we’re embroiled in a damned imperial scandal.”
 
Malcolm stared at the candelabrum on the writing table in their bedchamber as he struck a flint to steel and each taper flared to life in turn. “Poor Lady Julia. Damnable to have done that to her.”
“She made a choice.” Suzanne dropped her shawl and reticule on the dressing table and began to peel off her gloves. The night’s revelations pounded in her head.
Malcolm cast a quick glance at her as he set down the tinderbox. “You’re usually more sympathetic with another woman.”
Suzanne tugged at a glove. It had caught on her wedding ring. “Lady Julia was in a difficult situation. But she had choices. She could have told her husband the truth.”
“One wonders why she didn’t.” Malcolm began to undo the buttons on his coat.
Suzanne watched her husband for a moment. Past choices gnawed at her mind. “She did no more than we’ve done. Just for the opposite side.”
“We chose this life.” He stripped off the coat, with a force that would no doubt horrify Addison, and flung it over the wing-back chair.
“It’s not as though you’ve never recruited an agent,” Suzanne pointed out.
“Recruited. Not blackmailed. Though God knows—”
In his eyes, she could see the ghosts of farmers, prostitutes, soldiers, and priests who had lost their lives in the Peninsula as British agents. “Guilt is a singularly useless emotion, darling.” God knows she said as much to herself often enough. She pulled the glove from her fingertips. “Lady Julia may have been blackmailed into her work, but she obviously had an aptitude for it. Surprisingly so for an untrained agent.”
“Are you suggesting this goes back farther than Brussels?”
“No, that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.” She dropped the glove beside her scarf and reticule, frowning at the tangle of ivory silk, embroidered silver net, and beaded champagne satin. “Perhaps Lady Julia found she enjoyed the chance to be more than the perfect wife.”
He shot a look at her. “You identify with her.”
“Hardly.” She swallowed, tasting bitter dregs. “I’d never claim to be a perfect wife.”
“You know very well what people think about you.” The smile faded from his eyes. “But Lady Julia was—”
“Betraying her husband rather than working with him?” Suzanne kept her gaze steady on her husband’s face as she dropped the second glove on the dressing table. “All couples are different, darling. We already knew she was able to betray John Ashton in some ways.”
“The question is which came first. We don’t know that any of her love affairs began before the spying.” Malcolm stared at his shirt cuff as he unfastened it.
“Apparently this all began because she didn’t want her husband to know about her gambling debts. So she cared what he thought.”
“Or she was afraid of him.” Malcolm undid the other shirt cuff. “If she knew he was having an affair with Violet Chase—”
“That might have made her angry,” Suzanne said. “Or hurt. But it wouldn’t have made her fear him.”
“If she suspected he wanted to find a way out of their marriage—”
Suzanne stared through the candlelight at him. “Is this my husband the rationalist talking? Darling, are you suggesting Julia Ashton wrote to her sister that she was afraid because she’d learned her husband was plotting to kill her so he could marry Violet Chase?”
“No. Maybe.” He scraped a hand through his hair. “I’m trying to come up with a thesis that fits the facts. And yet I can’t help thinking—”
“What?”
He crossed to the dressing table. “The look on Ashton’s face last night when he learned about Lady Julia’s affair with the Prince of Orange. Whoever betrayed whom first, I’d swear he was in genuine torment.” He reached out and pulled her abruptly into his arms.
“Malcolm—” Suzanne said, half a laugh, half a gasp of surprise.
He took her face between his hands. She could feel his fingers trembling. “How by all that’s holy did I wind up with you?”
Her breath caught in her throat. “I ask myself the same thing every day, darling.”
“You made the best of a difficult bargain.”
She kissed him, because she didn’t trust herself to speak.
 
The sun beat down on the cobblestones. Suzanne’s chemise clung to her skin and the lace of her mantilla seemed to be plastered to her neck and shoulders. At least it wasn’t as heavy as a cloak. And it let her blend in with the other Bruxellois hurrying along the street. She stopped to buy oranges from a street-seller and put them in the basket she carried over her arm, a matron doing her marketing. She turned down a side street, keeping her pace steady.
The shade offered by the close-set buildings was a welcome relief. Laundry flapped overhead in the faint breeze. The side street was empty, but she continued her slow pace and pulled her shopping list from her basket. One never knew who might be watching from an overhanging window.
Near the gilded magnificence of the Place Royale, she went down a flight of stone steps to the Rue d’Isabelle, thrown into shadows by the taller buildings that crowded round it, nodded at a woman watering the flowers in her window box, stopped to pet a cat dozing in the sun, and then turned down a narrow alley. Even in the middle of the afternoon, little sun leached between the close-set buildings in the medieval part of the city. She pulled a key from the bottom of her basket and unlocked the third door. She pushed it open and stepped into a close passage that smelled faintly of damp. Down the passage, up the splintery flight of stairs. At the stair head, she gave a thrush’s call. An answering call sounded from behind the first door. Suzanne drew a breath and turned the door handle.
Raoul O’Roarke was sitting on a ladder-back chair at a small table, turning the pages of
Le Moniteur,
as impeccably dressed as he had been at the opera last night, though he wore a pale gray coat, pantaloons, and Hessians. He got to his feet at her entrance. “What is it? You know it’s risky—”
“This couldn’t wait.” She threw her basket on the narrow cot against the wall. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that Julia Ashton was one of ours?”
23
R
aoul stared at her, frozen in rare shock.
“Querida—”
“Don’t you dare.” She closed the distance between them. “Whose idea was it to kill Malcolm?”
He reached for her hands. “For God’s sake, you can’t—”
Suzanne jerked her hands from his grip and seized the lapels of his coat. “We’re talking about my husband.”
“Give me a moment to catch up. I’m not as quick as I once was. You’re saying Julia Ashton was a French spy?”
“Don’t you dare pretend you didn’t know.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“You bastard.” She could feel the hot, close air clawing at her skin. “I knew you didn’t tell me everything, but to keep me in the dark about this—”
“Suzanne.” He took her shoulders in a hard clasp. “I didn’t know. I didn’t have the least suspicion. I swear it.”
She looked into his gray eyes, familiar yet elusive. She could almost always tell when he was lying. Almost. “You can’t expect me to believe—”
“You know what a web intelligence is. On the British side as well as ours.” His gaze held her own, calm and steady. “No one knows every agent.”
“You—”
“Even me. I’m good, but I’m not that good. Use your head,
querida
. If I had known, don’t you think I’d have told you after Julia Ashton died? For fear of what you might uncover in the investigation?”
“I didn’t tell you I was investigating.”
“First you credit me with omniscience, then you treat me like a blind fool. Do you imagine I didn’t know Malcolm was investigating Lady Julia’s death? And that of course you were helping him?”
She released a breath. “I concede the point.”
“Progress.” His grip slid from her shoulders to her arms. He drew her over to the cot and pulled up the ladder-back chair beside her. “Tell me what you know.”
She recounted what they’d uncovered about Julia Ashton’s work for the French as the Silver Hawk.
“Dangerous to create an agent through blackmail,” Raoul said. “Messy, and they tend to be unreliable.”
“According to Vedrin she was run by someone getting orders directly from Paris. That person ordered her to kill Malcolm.” She scanned Raoul’s face again, lean, fine boned, elusive.
He returned her gaze, his own unexpectedly open. “Do you really think I’d be capable of killing Malcolm? I’ve known him since he was a boy, even if we did end up on opposite sides.”
“Since when have you been one to let friendship stand in your way?”
He watched her in silence for a moment. “Do you think I’d be capable of killing him knowing what he’s come to mean to you?”
“Not lightly.” She kept her gaze locked on his. “But if you thought it important enough—”
He gave an odd, twisted smile. “There are some things you still don’t know about me,
querida
.”
“You’re right. I don’t know how far you’ll go.”
“Or where I’ll stop.” He leaned toward her, hands on his knees. “Consider it practically then. You’re of much more use to me as the wife of Malcolm Rannoch, diplomat and British agent, than you would be as a widow.”
She flinched at the word “widow.” “Who would want to kill Malcolm?”
“I don’t know.” For a moment, she’d swear she saw unbanked rage in Raoul’s eyes.
The air seemed to have grown even warmer since she entered the room, heavy with the promise of rain. She tugged her mantilla from her head. “Is it true?” She stripped off her gloves. “That the French have crossed the frontier?”
His gaze flickered over her face as though it were enemy terrain.
“Dear God.” She stared at the only person in the world to whom she’d told the unvarnished truth since she was fifteen. “You don’t trust me.”
“It’s not a question of trust. You know as well as I do it makes no sense to reveal non-essential information.”
“Three years ago you’d have told me.”
“Three years ago you weren’t the wife of a British agent.”
“Whom I married on your orders to spy for France.”
“My suggestion, not my orders.” Raoul sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. “I recall quite distinctly telling you you’d have to decide for yourself.”
She glanced away, fingers locked on her elbows. It seemed a world away, but she could vividly recall that meeting, in a garret room in Lisbon not unlike this one, the bite of late November sharp in the air. The British diplomat she’d met on a mission had unexpectedly proposed to her, thinking she’d been left alone and penniless when her parents were killed in the war. She’d gone to Raoul to ask what to do. She’d been startled, aware of the dangers and opportunities, intrigued by the challenge.
She hadn’t had the least idea what she was getting into.
“It was also before you fell in love with him,” Raoul said in a quiet voice.
Suzanne met the gaze of her former lover. “You think I’ve gone soft.”
“I think you’re under unbearable strain. It isn’t just Malcolm. It’s Somerset and March and Gordon and Canning and all the others you talk about. They’ve become your friends. Believe me, I know. All those years in Spain pretending I was allied with the British. I formed friendships myself. With people who are my friends to this day. Who haven’t the least idea of my true loyalties. But I was never as deeply immersed in British diplomatic and military circles as you are.”
She closed her arms over her chest. “I managed in Vienna. I knew how I felt about Malcolm then.”
“But reporting on the deliberations in Vienna, with so many different sides and with just about everyone dealing in intelligence, was quite different from passing on Wellington’s plans in the buildup to armed conflict. With your friends—and the husband you love—on the opposite side.”
Her fingers dug deeper into her arms. “It doesn’t change what I believe in. It doesn’t change the fact that I think Bonaparte’s return is the best hope we have for retaining some trace of liberty, equality, and fraternity. If I didn’t, do you think I’d have done what I’ve done? Lied to my husband, deceived my friends, made a mockery of every vow I’ve ever sworn—”
“No.” His gaze moved over her face. “I don’t expect you to believe this, but I trust you as much as I’ve ever trusted anyone.”
For a moment she was fifteen again, the angry, defiant girl whose father had raised her on Paine and Locke and Beaumarchais, who had seen her father and sister killed by British soldiers, who had been left broken and alone in a strange city. The girl Raoul O’Roarke had found in a brothel, restored to a sense of purpose, trained as an agent. She’d been playing a part for so long she sometimes forgot who she really was. But somewhere beneath the silk and goffered linen and canvas stays of Mrs. Malcolm Rannoch, the core of that girl remained. A girl who would put her cause ahead of all else.
She remembered March and Fitzroy the previous night. Cheerful, loyal, about to charge off to a battle she was doing everything in her power to ensure they lost. “I am getting soft.”
“You’re better than you ever were. I’m only afraid you’ll break your health.”
“I’m fine.” She met his gaze. “If Julia Ashton was being run from Paris, that means someone in Paris wants Malcolm dead.”
“So it does.” His mouth turned grim.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You wouldn’t tell me if you did know.”
“Perhaps not. But as it happens, I truly haven’t the least idea. God knows the British would feel your husband’s absence. But it would hardly turn the tide of the war.”
“You sound like Malcolm. He’s refusing to take the whole thing seriously.”
“Querida—”
He reached out and gripped her hand. “I’ll learn what I can. My word on it.”
His promise was ridiculously warming. “Thank you. And Julia Ashton?”
“I have every faith that you and Malcolm can discover who killed her. And I’ve heard excellent reports of Harry Davenport.”
“No matter where the investigation takes us?”
“I trust you to be careful.”
She picked up her gloves and drew them through her fingers. The bars of light coming through the high window glinted off her wedding band. “Harry Davenport’s wife hurt him so much I doubt he’ll ever be able to trust again. When I think of what I’ve done to Malcolm—”
“There are different kinds of betrayal,” Raoul said.
She looked up, conscious of the pressure of his gaze. “You never asked me to seduce a powerful man after I married Malcolm. A Lord Uxbridge or a Prince of Orange.”
“No.”
“I could have discovered useful information. I did often enough before I married Malcolm.” And, if she was honest with herself, at times she’d enjoyed the challenge.
A muscle flexed beside his mouth. He’d always been calmly matter-of-fact about the missions she embarked on that could involve seduction. “It was different after you married Malcolm.”
“Why? It’s all part of the job, that’s what you told me. You’ve done the same yourself.”
“Very true. But for all my roles, I’ve never played the part of a loyal spouse.”
“Played.”
“You could have lost Malcolm’s trust and any information you can get from him. And you could have destroyed your marriage.”
She gave a short laugh.
“However it began, your marriage is a very real thing.”
“A real thing built on lies and deceit.”
“You told me once that though he might not know your true name, Malcolm knew you as no one else ever had. Even me.”
She remembered that conversation keenly. Fresh from her first visit to Britain as Malcolm’s wife. Still reeling from the wondrous, painful realization that she’d fallen in love with the man she’d married. For days together she’d been determined to stop spying. She’d even contemplated telling her husband the truth. She’d told Raoul as much when she’d met him in secret on the way to Vienna for the Congress. To be fair, he’d replied that she’d have to do as she saw fit. Had he seen how it would be even then? Because when she’d reached Vienna it had been all too clear how things stood. The powers that be—including Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh—were determined to turn back the clock to the ancien régime. To get rid of every reform made in Europe for the past twenty-five years. To stifle all dissent for fear of revolution. That wasn’t the world she wanted her son to grow up in.
And so while her husband, who by no means wanted such a world himself, had performed his duties as an attaché and argued with Castlereagh over the port, she’d gone on passing information to Raoul. And when Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba, she’d been aware of a mingled rush of fear and hope.
She picked up her mantilla and gloves and got to her feet. “I should get back. Malcolm has gone with Harry Davenport to talk to John Ashton.”
Raoul got to his feet as well. “One way or another it will all be over soon.”
She flung the mantilla over her shoulders. “I’m supposed to find that comforting?”
“No. But it will let you move forward.”
She froze in the midst of drawing on her gloves and studied his face. His cheekbones were white, his mouth taut with strain. And his eyes—“You’re terrified.”
“My dear. How could I not be?” He took her ungloved hand and lifted it to his lips with a formality that carried tenderness but no echo of a lover. “Are you going to be all right?”
She pulled her hand from his clasp and tugged on her second glove. “What would you do if I said I wasn’t?”
“Get you out of here.”
She jerked her mantilla over her shoulders. “Even you aren’t so omnipotent.”
“Trust me, if necessary I’d arrange it.”
“I’ll manage. I’m not a fool.”
“You’re human. Something we forget at our peril.” He hesitated, as though perhaps about to say something more. “Be careful,
querida
.”
“I always am.” She picked up her basket. “You trained me well.”
 
John Ashton stared from Malcolm to Davenport. “This is a damnable time to be making jokes, Rannoch.”
“I’m afraid it’s no joke,” Malcolm said. “I’m sorry, Ashton.”
“No.” Ashton spun away and took a turn round the Headquarters sitting room where they were closeted. “For God’s sake I knew my own wife.” He gave a rough laugh. “God, that’s rich. Yes, she deceived me with another man. But Julia wouldn’t—”
“I’m afraid there’s no doubt,” Malcolm said.
Ashton stared at him with eyes like glass blasted by a shell. “She can’t have known what she was doing.”
“Vedrin was blackmailing her,” Malcolm said. “She was in an impossible situation.”
“But she could have told me.”
“Why didn’t she?” Davenport, leaning against the wall, spoke with the quiet of an assassin about to slide a knife from the scabbard.

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